Happy new year everyone - we are only just at the start of 2015 and it’s already been a pretty exciting year for me, as well as a trying one.
I’m 33 and, honest to god, all I am trying to do is use my ‘fame’ for the better good, to raise awareness of an important issue, to make everyone else happy and to (hopefully) forge a career out of this and provide for my family.
Isn’t that what I am supposed to do - feed my family and be a good person? What more do I have to do to prove myself?
NOTHING is the answer. I don’t need approval of a few narrow-minded idiots online who I will never meet and, if i did, they would probably not even say a word. These idiots don’t pay my bills and - after talking to Maria Fowler - I realised that I don’t have to take this anymore.
Yes, I want to carry on doing what I am doing, and, yes, I will continue to work towards finding a solution to the problem of online safety, but I need to do stuff for me.
"Suffering from depression is still very real constant battle"
I am being screamed at by my girlfriend and my friends to take time out and do things that make me happy, because if I am miserable I can’t get the other things I want to do done.
I have been suffering in silence because I didn’t want to be seen as weak. But I want to be the dad that I didn’t have; I want to show my son my favourite movies, I want to take him to my favourite places and I want my son to be my best friend.
At the rate I'm going, burning myself out for everyone else and having to worry non stop about paying the bills, I'm worried that I'll be dead before he is even old enough to remember me.
Yes, I have contemplated ending it all.
I have sat in my office and cried, looking at my computer screen and thinking ‘I could end this all right now’.
Suffering from depression is still a very real constant battle - and I have not resorted to drink or drugs, despite the fact people have accused me of being back on heroin. I have had to battle the ‘old’ me coming back out also and this whole thing hasn’t been easy.
Channel 4 offered me zero support after the airing of the film; there was no ‘media training’, no calls to ask how I was doing, nothing - they got what they wanted and that’s that.
I have briefly spoken with the production team who made the film and everything is cool with those guys; it’s Channel 4 that I feel let down by – but you live and you learn I guess.
So now I am here, sitting on my train from Derby to Preston, determined to be that father that I didn’t have, to be that person I know I can be and to not ever give up or give in - despite what a few horrible little pr**ks shout about online.