Thursday 17th April 2014

I felt like shit today.  I was so tired and I had both a headache and pain in my right hip.  I may have been saved from falling to the darkness by a kind stranger last Saturday but the darkness is still there, still beckoning me to it, and the only thing stopping me from succumbing to it are the text messages from the stranger who saved me.

I had to go out to do a little shopping with what little money I have left but I really didn’t want to leave the flat.  I want to cut ties with the ‘real’ world and the people who inhabit it.  I would rather exist only in the online world where I have received the most support in all my times of sorrow and crisis (even though they were unable to help me last Saturday and it was, ironically, someone in the ‘real’ world who saved me).

I feel so lonely in the ‘real’ world but, in the online world, I at least have a kind of family who don’t judge me or look down on me.

A friend in the ‘real’ world asked if I would like to go to a protest march in London and I would love to go but I can’t afford the fare to London.  He has offered to pay for me to go with him but I can’t accept because it would just not be right to accept.

I never thought my life would come to this – relying on the generosity of family and strangers – but it has and I feel so emasculated.  I have no money of my own now and I have to live entirely at the expense of family.  If I need money, I have to go cap in hand to my wife or my parents because I can’t get a job and the welfare payments I was receiving have been stopped.

I have tried so hard to prevent this situation but I have been inexorably dragged to this point and I feel such a failure.