Wrenasaurus

Just another ranty lefty trying to make their way in the world

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Everyone relax, this isn’t goodbye!

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Hey guys,

Jesus, I’ve only been gone a day and I’ve had message after message worrying about me! It’s so bloody nice of you all, and it’s been so lovely, so I thought I should let you all know where I am.

Firstly, I just wanted to put some rumours to rest.

No, I haven’t been suspended (sorry to all you little witch hunters, better luck next time 😘)

And no, I haven’t deleted due to anything negative (again, sorry not sorry to those of you trying to spin that one)

Simply, I need a wee break. I’ve recently started an NVQ for work, and it’s something that I need to crack on with, as well as finishing my level 2 certificate in mental health. I need to finish the cert as soon as I can, and I have a deadline on the 15th for my NVQ, and the first assignments are pretty hefty.

Secondly, it’s Christmas and twitter has taken up A LOT of my time recently. I’m working solidly between Christmas day and new years eve, so I want to take some time, unplug and spend it with my partner. He’s the most important thing in my life, he’s my rock, my confidant and he’s the reason I’ve come so far, so I felt like I owed him my full attention for our first Christmas in our new home. He deserves it 🙂

Lastly, you’ll soon see that I will do this periodically. This is the first time, but it won’t be the last.

For me, twitter is so full on, so for my own head I like to have time away. It’s healthy for me.

So, like I said, I’ll be back ❤️ I love you all, you’re all amazing.

Keep fighting the good fight, all of you.

Solidarity and Merry Fucking Christmas ❤️

CLASS WAR – Don’t give me your bullshit, it’s real (Part One)

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I’ve been thinking more and more recently on the subject of war. Weirdly, it’s been a very consistent part of my life, and something that I’ve analysed over and over again in various parts of my life.

As you probably know, I come from a military family, my father has been to active war zones, and as a result, I had an upbringing that normalised it. From my earliest memories, my dad was a man who was there for weeks at a time, but then disappeared for months on end, taken away for months at a time, our only communication being through “blueys”, the airmail letters that would sometimes take weeks to get to him. It’s so strange, knowing that I grew up in an environment that glorified this, put human conflict on a pedestal, saw it as something to be celebrated. Yet I’ve grown up with the polar opposite view of it. Back when I was a child, I was always told it was for the greater good, that we were either defending ourselves, our “glorious interests” abroad and overseas, or that we were liberating those under oppressive regimes. I don’t know at what age I realised that this was a lie, I know I was young. What I do remember is that I believed it for a period, which is why I will NEVER blame soldiers for their actions.

When fed a pack of lies, told the same bullshit over and over again until it becomes ingrained, you believe that you’re literally doing it for the sake of your family, their safety and well being. You’re doing it for your country. And I don’t blame people for believing the narrative, because it’s all the disgusting orchestrations of the ruling elite. It’s shoved down everyone’s throats, force fed to us on the TV, shovelled into us by newspapers. We hear it on the fucking radio and it’s gloried in songs. We see parades in the streets, displays on the television. And the worst bit about this mentality, the people who are drawn into it, are young men who come from impoverished areas. Just like my father. He was one of those young men. He grew up in a poor part of Middlesbrough, a town which is already falling apart at the seams, and he came from a very, very poor part of it called Park End. My father didn’t do well in school, something which I still struggle to believe because he’s such an intelligent man, but according to him, he was just a dick. His stories of being caned have a macabre kind of humour to them, his disrespect for authority is one of the rare things that he has passed onto me and one of the things that I adore him for. He may be a Tory, but no one can tell my father what to do if he doesn’t want to. Anyways, he grew up in Middlesbrough, a town which was spiralling into poverty around about the time of his childhood. Opportunities are rare, and if you were a young lad like my father who didn’t have the qualifications, there’s scant options of career choice that can provide a stable and fulfilling living.

But the army, specifically the Royal Engineers for him, offered all the things he wanted. He was already courting my mum from an early age. They were teenage sweethearts and he loved, and continues to love, the hell out of her. She had her own issues at home. Her mother had died when she was young, leaving her in a home with four siblings, all younger than her, who looked up to her as a mother figure. Her father was an arsehole, he didn’t know how to care for his family, and to add insult to injury he quickly married the most vile woman I have ever had the displeasure of meeting. Despite promising my late nana, on her deathbed, that he wouldn’t, because the woman was, and continues to be, a git. This was highlighted a few years ago when she stole over £100k from my grandad who is now riddled with Alzheimers and is in a home. So, my father wanted to rescue her, at the age of sixteen, and take her away from a home life that was slowly but surely running her into the ground.

And so, here was the appeal of the army. It’s always been shown to be a magnificent career, a way to pull yourself out of poverty, a way to see the world past the litter strewn streets of your council estate. It offered him a steady wage, adventure, a home for both him and my mum, and qualifications to help him learn a trade. He loved the idea of being part of something, of the camaraderie he would find working alongside other lads just like him. Other guys he knew were drawn in too, they egged each other on, going to the sign up together and talking about where their future days might take them. They were proud, safe in the knowledge that they would be doing something noble, something that would raise them above the people and the places that they were leaving behind.

And it’s the same today, isn’t it? You never really hear of the children of bankers going off and joining the army. Never hear of a millionaire’s spawn giving up his life of luxury to piss off to an army camp to be shouted at by some dude with a small man complex. It’s always us. Always the poor. It’s always those of us who didn’t do well in school, it’s those of us who grew up in insecurity, the threat of hunger always plaguing our existence, who are drawn to the fold of the military. It’s those people who have no other options, who didn’t do well in school, who were told that because of this they would never amount to anything, who are the first to be fed to war. They’re the ones who are sent into the battlefield, sent out to die, to lose their friends and to come back emotionally fucked. They’re the ones who are expendable. Sent to protect their country and their betters, under the pretence of defending their family and country.

And it’s class fucking war. And it’s only one head of the hideous hydra that is this social warfare. There’s so many aspects of it, so many things that people don’t even consider, the constant oppression of the poorer classes by their wealthy counterparts, that for some reason has been completely normalised and accepted by us. We don’t even know it’s happening most of the time, we have grown so apathetic that we just accept it, think that it’s our lot in life and it’s just the way things are.

Bull-fucking-shit.

For some reason, somewhere down the line, we forgot what it was like to hold those above us to account. They’ve lied to us, cowed us into believing that somehow, we cannot live without them, that we cannot go on living, cannot exist without the fat-cat bosses, the extraordinarily rich corporations and the political elites giving us jobs and incomes that don’t even make fucking ends meet. They have us believing that, somehow, they are doing us a favour by giving us just enough to literally not die, as we feed their empires, funnel money that we have made for them, into offshore bank accounts so that it can’t even go back into the meagre social tax contributions that we have in place.

This. Is. Bullshit.

And I’m so bloody baffled by the whole thing. We outnumber them so fucking much. There are literally billions of us, we all struggle. We have people who work forty hours a week who cannot afford to pay their bills. We have single parents working multiple jobs just to make sure that their children have clothes on their backs, and yet they still have to pay for childcare. We have elderly who have to choose between eating and heating their homes. People are working well into their sixties, the years that they should be able to kick back and rest, safe in the knowledge that the disproportionate taxes that they have paid will keep them going in their retirement. An NHS whose funds are being stripped and sold to private pockets.

And all this time we have fucking Jeff Bezos earning over SIX FUCKING BILLION a month. A fucking month. That’s approximately $8,961,187 an hour. The average Amazon worker makes around $28,466 a year. That’s 315 times his averages workers annual pay in a fucking hour. His workers would have to work 597,412 hours, or 24 hours a day for about 68 years, just to earn what Bezos makes in one hour.

And all this time, his employees are given off the wall, bat-shit insane targets to hit, they have minuscule break times, work place injuries are common, toilet breaks are numbered and timed. They are treated like commodities, expendable, sacked for the smallest of discrepancies. They are treated inhumanly, nothing more than a tool of which Bezos uses to grow his vast, unfair wealth. He lines his pockets on the suffering of his workers. They are nothing to him. They are not a person, not a name, not a sentient being with thoughts and feelings who are just trying to make a living. They are a tool. And it’s the same everywhere. Every single greedy, vile little capitalist bigshot has the same mentality, the same psychopathic and narcissistic traits where they see us as nothing more but pawns, easily thrown aside if it means they can swell their bank accounts.


What the utter fuck are we doing? How the hell have we allowed this to happen?

Thanks for reading this so far guys, sorry it’s only a short multi-parter. I wanted to try out my new laptop and fuck me, I’ve blasted this one out 🙂 Next time I’ll touch on the rest of the Hydra’s heads, because it gets so much worse. I’ll go into detail on the NHS, the police and how they are nothing but a shield for the elite. I’ll touch on politicians, the royal family, the bankers and more.

Fuck me, this could be a full series.

Mental Health and Me – An Insight

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I’m not going to lie. World mental health day completely crept up on me this year. Usually I know the date, it’s there, in my head, because it’s important to me. But let’s be honest, it’s been a bitch of a year, so you can forgive me for forgetting just this once.

I didn’t know what to write for this blog piece. It’s not that I don’t know anything about mental health issues, as most of you all know, I’m pretty honest about the fact that I have mental health problems, and although I’m one of the lucky ones and they’re very much under control now, my experience of the subject is extensive.

I have BPD AKA Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s an interesting condition, a bitch of a thing, but interesting, so I’m going to try and outline my experience of it. I’m going to try to explain how it manifested in my life, how it dictated the person I am today, and hopefully, show you how I turned it from a negative into a positive.

Firstly, let me tell you a little about the condition. There are nine major symptoms of BPD:

-Fear of abandonment. People with BPD are often terrified of being abandoned or left alone
-Unstable relationships
-Unclear or shifting self-image
-Impulsive, self-destructive behaviors
-Self-harm
-Extreme emotional swings
-Chronic feelings of emptiness
-Explosive anger

Yup, those are lifted from Google directly. Partially because I’m lazy, partially because they really are spot on. Bit every single one of those apply to me.

Apart from the explosive anger.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had outbursts in my life (I once pissed on my exes playstation because he cheated on me) but I’ve never been a particularly angry person. Unless you can count anger that has been directed at myself, if you count that, then okay, it’s a relevant symptom. My anger towards myself was once so huge that I bear the scars to this day.

I’m thirty two now, and it’s only been in the past six years that I got my diagnosis. And that was after years and years of struggle, years and years of drug abuse, flitting from unhealthy relationship to unhealthy relationship. It was after years of homelessness, years of hurting myself and years of slowly killing myself.

I don’t know where to start. So I’ll tell you about a brief period in my life where I was so broken I was falling apart.

And this was after the homelessness.

Once upon a time I lived in a flat with a bunch of stoners. They were the loveliest people in the world, far more lovely than what I though I deserved at the time, and we lived in an upstairs flat in a village. They were so kind and understanding, so ready to listen to my problems if I needed them too but unfortunately, because of my mental health problems, I didn’t think I was worth their time. I’ve had a lot of issues around abandonment, a little known fact that I haven’t told you guys is that I went to boarding school when I was a kid. My father was in the forces and we moved around a lot, always going from camp to camp, never really having a solid home, so my parents decided to put me into a boarding school so I would have some stability. I can see why they made this choice, they thought they were doing the best by me, ensuring that I didn’t have to leave friends behind every few years, breaking my heart time and time again as I had to say goodbye to those I love. And I was implicit in their decision because I encouraged it. I didn’t know it would be a terrible choice. As a result of going to boarding school, I only saw my parents either six time a year or three, depending on if my father was posted abroad or not, and this in itself caused a whole rift of issues. Me and my parents were never close because of this. When you have a child who you don’t see everyday, who you don’t interact with, cuddle when they need it and only get to speak to on the phone for weeks at a time, it tends to make you frow apart. Coupled with the ruthless bullying in school, being a total loner and having to live with those who tormented me, it left me with emotional scars. I had no one there for me, no one to really lean on, when I was going through some tender fucking times. Hence the fear of abandonment. I am old enough and stable enough to identity that this is where this first issue came from. Those who I did get close to, and those who I did love, I was so afraid that they’d leave me alone, as scared and destitute as I had been as a pre-teen.

And somehow, in some way, my brain turned it around at some point in my life. All of those who I truly loved, my parents, those partners who all truly mattered to me, would all leave me in the end, much as they always had. And it manifested in this house.

When I lived in this flat, I wasn’t so much of a drug addict anymore, save for the weed. Weed has been a constant since I quit the more hardcore narcotics, helping me to wean off them. It’s something I still use and am still not strong enough to let go of. But I was very much an alcoholic.

Working in a bar, especially one where I was offered a lot of discount just for working there, meant that a lot of my wages were poured back into the place. Even at the expense of my rent. And there manifests your impulsive and self destructive behaviours. Just as alive as it was when I was a drug addict, but in the eyes of society, this was acceptable. Coupled with the legal painkillers such as codeine that I would ingest in amounts that probably should have killed me, I was a wreck.

I drank so I could cope. I was holding down a job and I’d been promoted, something that to this day I have no idea how I did it, but without the booze I was just a nervous wreck.

I went to work every day, but when I wasn’t at work I was just sat in my very messy room. And when I say messy, I mean it was disgusting, a vile imalgination of dirty clothes, empty medication wrappers, razor blades and takeaway boxes. And it’s the only other place I’d be. I was too scared to leave it. I’d come into the flat, if I was drunk out of my mind, I’d speak to my housemates in the living room, but other than that, I locked myself away. I was too afraid of what they thought of me, too afraid that they’d speak to me. I didn’t want to get close to them, just incase they left like everyone else.

I’d sit for hours in my room, staring at the door every time someone walked past, preying that no one would knock as I nailed another can of cheap cider. I’d only leave the room, even to pee, if I knew everyone was out or were asleep.

I didn’t feel like anyone should even have to look at me because I was such a mess.

Another thing I should probably mention is that I used to be a prolific self harmer. If you look at my arms and legs, particularly my left arm, they’re covered in scars from years and years of taking out my pain on myself. I have no shame of them now, at all. And I don’t say that for effect. I’m brave enough now to show them in public, in front of my family who, to this day, have never even mentioned them to me. I used to find that physical pain was so much more manageable than mental anguish, and it was my coping mechanism for so long.

It’s been years since I’ve turned to this, and I’m so proud.

Once upon a time they were a source of shame, I remember silently crying my eyes out as the bath turned slowly redder and redder when I lived in the flat, punishing myself because I was the way I was.

And now I am so unashamed. Once upon a time I looked down and saw weakness, each cut in my arm a testimony to how weak I was, how I couldn’t cope. Now I look down at every shiny scar, large or small, and realise that every single one is a bad day, a bad feeling that I have overcome.

They make me realise that no matter how bad my day is, I have overcome every bad day I’ve had before.

They’re so faded now

I feel like I’m rambling. I’ll try cut it down now.

When I was in the flat and well before, I went from one shitty relationship to another, taking what I could from whatever abusive bastard that came my way, because I didn’t think I was worth more. It was always people who took advantage of my good nature in some way. Towards the end, I chose to be single and it helped me so much. My paranoia of being left was constant when I was with someone, forever thinking about my inadequacies, forever comparing myself to someone else. My own self hatred, I projected onto others, convincing myself that they disliked me for my own self perceived flaws.

And I had so many of them. I literally couldn’t look in a mirror because I hated what I saw. I wouldn’t shower for weeks at a time, convinced that I wasn’t worth the effort. My weight fluctuated, I was either super thin, unable to eat because of stress, or I’d binge constantly, stuffing my face to try and fill an emptiness that I didn’t understand. And my sleep pattern was fucked, laying awake all night worrying about impossible scenarios, running bullshit events through my head over and over. It was torment.

Anyways, I should probably talk about how I got better, I’ve rambled on enough.

It’s been years since I’ve had a proper, all-consuming flare up, one that’s lasted for weeks. It’s been years since depression ruled my life, years since I’ve had a suicidal thought, and I’m so fucking lucky for that. Once upon a time I honestly thought it was permenent, that when everyone told me that I could get through it, it was a lie and that I would never feel anything but the constant drone of sadness. I never thought I’d be happy again.

Trust me, it does get fucking better. Hold on, because I promise you that the sun will shine again. There’s tears in my eyes writing that line, because I know the pain and the hurt that some of you are feeling and I truly wish I could help you to understand that you’re not alone, that it does get better and that there are people here for you.

That’s what happened to me. I met people who understood. People who knew there was something wrong and who actively pushed me in the beginning to break the silence and admit that I wasn’t okay. They made me come out of my room, one of them would literally appear in the flat and refuse to leave until I came out. They pushed me to talk, listened to me and held me when I cried. They taught me that it was okay to not be okay, that I was worth something. They showed me I was worth a phone call, that I was funny, that I could leave the house with my head held high.

I’m still crying as I write this, and I need to stop, because those exact people are coming over today.

I can never thank them enough for what they have done for me, and I know that they are going to be in my life forever because without them I wouldn’t be the person I am today, and I can finally say that I’m so happy with who I am. I’m proud of me.

One out of four people in the UK suffer with mental health issues. That’s one in fucking four of us who are struggling. A fucking quarter.

Please, we need to start talking about this.

We need to break the stigma.

My inbox is always open for anyone who needs it. If you need help, no matter how big or small, please please please get in touch.

You’re not alone.