The author grew up in a council house in the 1970s in a world where children were seen and not heard. On the surface, life looked normal, but what happened behind closed doors did not feel normal at all. The author always felt different and was labeled as shy, but being around people felt overwhelming, like constantly being on edge and scanning for something that could not be named. There was no sense of safety, even when nothing obvious was wrong.
When the author was six, the parents divorced. The mother left and started a new life with the author’s sister. The author stayed behind with the father. The father told the author that if he went with her, he would kill himself. The author believed him. As a child, those things are not questioned. They are taken in as truth. The author carried a weight that no child should have to carry, the belief that someone’s life depended on him.
Looking back, that is when the fear took hold. The father was deeply hurt by the breakup. He drank heavily and did not work for long periods. The author did not understand his pain at the time, only how it showed up, which was anger. The author became the place where that anger landed. Some days, the father would be waiting when the author got home from school. If the author was even a few minutes late, he would be hit. It was not a one-off. It became a pattern. The author learned to anticipate it, even without knowing what he had done wrong.
Growing up like that changes how you live. The author was always alert, always careful, always trying to get it right, and somehow always feeling like he did not. The father was not a bad man, the author can see that now, but he was not capable of being a father in the way the author needed. There was no warmth, no reassurance, no sense of safety. The author was not allowed to sit in the living room. Most days, he stayed in his bedroom with nothing to do but look out the window and imagine a different life. He built entire worlds in his head just to escape the one he was in.
The author had friends but was always on the outside. He could not go out as often as they did. Slowly, he got left behind. At night, the fear would come out in ways he did not understand. He wet the bed until he was around twelve. He carried shame without knowing why. Something in him already felt wrong.
By the time the author was eleven or twelve, he found his first escape, butane gas. He used to steal lighter refills from a local shop. The shopkeeper left a small window open behind the till, and the author would reach in and grab them. He would spray it into his jumper and inhale it. For the first time, he could leave his head. It did not stop there. Glue, petrol, then cannabis and amphetamines by the time he was fourteen. It was not about getting high, not really. It was about not feeling what he was feeling.
That became the author’s life for the next twenty-five years. Getting out of his head was not just something he did, it was something he needed. Substances became a daily habit and eventually took over everything. He lost friends, lost direction, and lost any sense of who he was. But in a strange way, he also found something he had never had before, belonging. The people he used with became his world. In that chaos, he felt understood. There were no expectations and no pressure to be anything other than what he was. For the first time, he did not feel like the odd one out. That made it even harder to leave, because how do you walk away from the only place you have ever felt accepted?
Then in the late eighties, something changed again. Ecstasy arrived. With it came something the author had never truly experienced before, what felt like love, connection, and openness. For the first time, he felt close to people and felt part of something. It was overwhelming in a different way, beautiful, powerful, and addictive. He did not want it to end. But it was not real, not in the way he needed it to be. It was a chemically created version of something he had been searching for his entire life. Once you have felt that, even artificially, it is hard to go back to emptiness. So he stayed for years.
It took a long time before something began to shift. There was not a single moment that changed everything. It was slower than that, subtle, almost unnoticeable at first. But somewhere along the way, the author started to see that the life he was living was not the only option. That maybe there was something else. More importantly, he had been ignoring it. Life had been trying to show him another way for a long time, but he was not ready to listen. As soon as he did, things began to change. He began to change.
Stepping away from that world was one of the hardest things the author has ever done. Not just because of the substances, but because he had to face everything he had spent years trying to avoid. The fear, the loneliness, the sense that he did not quite belong anywhere, and the truth that along the way he had hurt people who cared about him. That is something he had to sit with. But he does not carry regret in the way he once did. He carries understanding. Because something unexpected happened when he stopped running. He began to understand himself.
The author started to see that he was not broken. He had simply adapted to an environment that did not feel safe. The anxiety, the withdrawal, the need to escape, it all made sense when he looked at it through that lens. His body had been trying to protect him all along. That realization changed everything. When you stop seeing yourself as the problem, you can finally start working with yourself instead of against yourself.
Now at fifty-six, the author’s life looks nothing like it did back then. He lives on the other side of the world. He has a family he never believed he would have. He has built something meaningful out of experiences he once thought had ruined him. More importantly, he feels something he did not think was possible, a sense of safety within himself. That does not mean life is perfect. It is not. There are still hard days and moments where old patterns try to creep in. But now he understands where they come from, and that changes how he responds.
If there is one thing the author has learned, it is that what looks like brokenness is often adaptation. The things we judge ourselves for, the anxiety, the coping mechanisms, the ways we try to escape, often began as ways to survive. Survival is not something to be ashamed of. It is something to be understood. The author’s story is a success story, but not because everything turned out perfectly. It is a success because he can now see a way through.
For anyone in a place where it feels like there is not a way through, the author wants them to know that there is. Life can improve when you begin to empathize with yourself and take even small steps toward change. When you do, something begins to shift. You begin to move. You begin to heal. Eventually, you begin to build a life that feels like your own.
