The successes of Adam and Beth, successfully killing themselves, that is, were significant influences on my life and my work. But it’s my original brush with suicide’s failure that plagues me most, that most strongly gives me these feelings I keep to myself, the feeling that suicide is sometimes nature’s way of doing the right thing by the ones you love. My father, the failure in every way, is my biggest inspiration.

Now I don’t know what kind of story it is I’m writing here, or if strictly speaking I’m even writing a story at all. Perhaps that’s already become clear to you? But whatever it is I’m disclosing, or putting down, or off-loading, or committing, or whatever, I can tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t a poor-little-me abuse porno. This isn’t where I describe in minute detail the years of cruelty that made me the warped monster I am today. I won’t paint a vivid picture of suffering to make you thankful for your beige upbringing, or if you were one of the unlucky ones, to act as a trigger or to make you feel closer to me through our shared trauma. I’m not going to give you, or him, or anyone, that. I recognise I have to put something on the record though, something to make you understand..

So I will try.

I’ll start by saying my dad didn’t fuck me. Not even once. So get your mind out of the gutter. And to the best of my knowledge he didn’t fuck my brother or sister either. I’ve never asked them though, and they have always been far more attractive than I, so I guess it’s always a possibility. I imagine it’s something most people give little thought to, but I for one am very grateful my father didn’t fuck me. I try to always remember that lots of people have had it a hell of a lot worse than I did.

I do know he fucked my mum on occasion, obviously, and I believe it was always with her consent. But he wasn’t always such a sweet guy. He also broke her jaw. And another time her ribs. I once saw him drag her along the floor by her hair. Another time he ripped her dress in two and strangled her in the kitchen. Her neck had bruises and scratches that took weeks to fully heal. He once threw my brother down the stairs. Only halfway down really, so it sounds worse than it was. Although he still broke his arm. He once punched me in the face. I got two black eyes, but it only bruised rather than broke my nose. Thank goodness, as my already outsized nose didn’t need any help drawing the eye. So to be fair to my father, who is a larger than average guy, he clearly didn’t punch me as hard as he was able to. He once literally threw me out on to the street. I fractured my ankle where it hit the curb, and I had to limp to a friend’s house to spend the night. Pretty embarrassing. He once stabbed me in the thumb with a sardine can lid. They’re really bloody sharp, and the cut stank of fish as I waited for hours in A&E to get it stitched up. Kind of a funny story I guess. Although maybe you had to be there.

But these flashes of actual physical person-on-person violence causing actual direct physical bodily harm were relatively rare. I can probably list them all on two hands. Maybe four or five hands. But rare nonetheless. Rare compared to the insults. Rare compared to the rage. Rare compared to the ranting. Rare compared to the threats. Rare compared to the seething hatred. Rare compared to the fear that was more or less a constant feature of my childhood.

My father worked shifts. So he didn’t have to keep regular hours. This meant the fear didn’t keep regular hours either. You couldn’t take a break from it at night. In fact, a whole lot of his ranting happened at night. If you’ve never experienced it, I can tell you that if you’re trying to carve out a run-of-the-mill existence for yourself, maybe prepare for exams, rest up before a date, recover from a night out, it’s very inconvenient to have your door ripped off its hinges, again, at three in the morning. It’s terribly exhausting to have your bedcovers dragged off you frequently throughout the night. It’s quite unsettling to have your father’s spit hitting your face as he kneels down next to your bed and screams abuse at you for the umpteenth time that evening. It does nothing for your beauty sleep to be listening to the rage when it’s in your mother’s room, having to stay constantly alert in case it tips over the edge where you need to call the police. Again.

But my father dearest was no vampire. His rage occurred just as frequently during daylight hours. What nighttime rage is to sleep, daytime rage is to pride. You see, daytime rage is trickier to contain, and therefore more often seen by others. It’s hard to hold your head high when people have seen your dad smashing your guitar and calling you a pathetic talentless waste of space because you had the nerve to let your friends wait outside the house while you get changed before heading out again, rather than the far preferable option of never bringing anyone anywhere near the house, and not having any friends in the first place. It’s tough to play the cool kid when your dad has caused a scene at the school play, storming out halfway through and dragging your mum behind him. Although I would like to state for the record that given the circumstances, my narration – I was always the narrator, never the star – barely faltered. It’s almost impossible to overcome the shame of people you know witnessing your dad losing his cool in a supermarket, smashing jars and making threats, and calling you a stupid whore who will never amount to anything.

So that was my world. A world in which it was difficult to get sleep, and even harder to get self-esteem. But I somehow got both, or enough of them both to function. Living like this was normal to me, but I knew it wasn’t everyone’s normal. I looked around me and I learned what most people’s normal was. I don’t just mean the lack of rage and violence. I knew that wasn’t normal pretty early on. I mean the subtler stuff. It took longer, but gradually it seeped in. The most epiphany-like moment came when I was twelve and my classmate Hannah suggested we hang out the following weekend. I must’ve said, ‘Sure that sounds like fun.’ Then as the weekend approached, she mentioned it again, like it was really going to happen.

‘Oh, so you’d actually meant it?’ I asked. ‘You actually want to hang out? We’re actually doing this?’

She was annoyed. Of course she meant it and wanted it to happen, otherwise she wouldn’t have said it. And so we hung out that weekend.

I know that’s a fairly uneventful story. There won’t be a bidding war for the film rights. But it slapped me in the face at the time, and twenty years on it’s still stuck with me. I think about all the times our family plans were cancelled because my dad decided to tear the house down with his rage. I think about all the times he fooled us, and we oh-so-very-nearly got to the place we said we were going to be. And then at the last minute he would stop the car and throw my mum out. He’d then drive at her as fast as he could and swerve off just at the last minute. Not even going through with that plan. He really was a very good driver, it must be said. Unless he was actually trying to hit her. Then not so much. It isn’t an earth-shattering story, I know, but by hanging out with me on a Saturday when I was twelve, as planned, Hannah taught me that most people go through with their plans, and that I should too.

I must’ve learned other things from all the more normal people who surrounded me too. Picking up on the way of the normals so I could attempt to pass for one of them. Because on balance, all things considered, I ended up being pretty darn good at passing for normal. Much like a photo of a high-quality wax celebrity sculpture, if you don’t spend too much time looking at me, I can pass for the real thing. But even then, even when you totally and utterly believe you’re looking at a photo on social media of your friend with the actual real John flipping Travolta next to them, even if as you scroll past that picture onto a photo of your workmate’s newly adopted rescue cat with the missing eye – bloody Susan showing all of Instagram she’s a flipping saint – and you’re still totally convinced and none the wiser as to the waxiness of that John Travolta you just saw, you still find yourself thinking that although you do really still love John Travolta – of course you do, he’s so talented, a triple threat – it really is a shame it seems there’s something a bit off about him nowadays. So yeah, that’s me. I appear almost normal, only a bit off.

Being a bit off used to upset me. Of course I wanted to be normal. Doesn’t everyone? But I’ve come to see being only a bit off as pretty good going. In evaluating the success of an outcome, you must account for the starting point. When I was twenty-four I attended a conference seminar on the effects of childhood trauma. It had very little to do with my work, but so did all the other talks in that particular timeslot, and it seemed the least boring, and it felt too early in the day to just bunk off completely and explore New York. I’d anticipated hearing about how people who’d spent their childhoods caged in a basement, or being screwed by their maths teacher, or being child stars, became truly disturbed adults. But instead I heard about the effects of childhoods like mine. Or maybe even childhoods that weren’t quite as bad as mine. Chaotic households, they called them, or harsh parenting households. Places where angry language is used, where there’s no routine, where there’s mess, where there’s fear and anxiety. Check, check, check, and check.

I’m not crazy, I knew the old violent childhood stuff wasn’t exactly great. I’d removed myself from that sort of environment as soon as I could, running away to university, and then to slum-like shared accommodation with strangers afterwards. And sure, I got away from the acute harm, from the sleep deprivation, from the physical violence. But the conference taught me there’s no real escape. I won’t ever be free of those early influences because they have chronic effects. I learned from this lecture, and from the hours of frantic research I did following it, that people who grow up surrounded by chaos and fear are more likely to live adult lives full of chaos and fear. More likely to suffer anxiety, depression, addiction. Maybe that’s predictable. Maybe I knew that really. But there was more than that, because an unhealthy early environment leads to unhealthy adult bodies – with people like me more likely to suffer cancer, heart disease, and auto-immune disorders. Maybe you think of course they’re more likely to be unhealthy if they’re more depressed and they’re drinking more? Well no. Because these scientists have shown that when you stress out young mice, they go on to have screwed up minds and bodies, and that certainly isn’t because they spend too much time in the pub. The stress re-wires them, messing up their hormones and their immune system. In that lecture, knowledge I’d always held in my body, somewhere in my gut, transferred to my brain: people who grew up like I did, our wiring is and will always be wrong.

This knowledge helped me in my work. I started to accept the thoughts I’d been having about suicide and its utility. I started to see myself as living proof that suicide could be a good thing, and that failing to top yourself, as my father had, could have detrimental effects on your kin. When I was sat in that conference at twenty-four years old, I’d recently been diagnosed with urticaria. It basically means itchy skin. I have itchy skin. All over. All the time. I take antihistamines every day, and that makes it a lot better. I’ve been taking them every day now for over ten years. If I don’t take them I eventually break out in hives. When I was twenty-nine, after complaining for years of dry eyes, a dry mouth, and – sorry for the TMI moment here – a dry vagina, I was eventually diagnosed with Sjörgen syndrome. My immune system is so utterly juiced and stressed and ready for action that it’s started attacking my own body. For now it’s attacking those bits which produce fluid, my tear glands and salivary glands, and who knows what it’ll go for next. This usually affects people in their forties, fifties and sixties. I developed it in my twenties. There’s no way the doctors can conclusively tell why I developed it so early. But I know why. It’s because by the time I left home at eighteen my body had already been through more than any decent lifetime’s worth of stress, anxiety, and fear.

Relatively speaking though, as long as I don’t develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the likelihood of which is increased by my Sjörgen syndrome, or full-blown lupus, I got off pretty lightly. I own my own flat. It’s not perfect, sure. It’s quite dusty because I find dusting mind-numbingly boring. My frizzy thick hair malts a lot and I don’t hoover quite often enough to prevent the occasional weird build-up of hairballs on my carpet. And it’s difficult to ever get my shower properly spotless because it’s hard to get behind the shower door, you know? But other than that it’s fairly clean and tidy and normal looking. I set my alarm every evening and I wake up after a few snoozes every morning and I show up only about ten to fifteen minutes late every day for my job. I frequently stay at work very late though, so I think it evens out, and my boss seems to agree. I meet most of my deadlines, and manage to shift those I don’t. I have friends who have good jobs and beautiful homes and loving families. I see them regularly and laugh and joke with them. Sometimes I even invite them into my flat. Not often, because it makes me very stressed to have people in my space. But I’ve had them here a few times and I’ve cooked for them and I think it’s always gone well. It’s never been my dream to travel, and yet I’ve visited numerous countries in the world, many of which were the locations of work conferences and so my travel was free. I can’t drive. But I live in London, so who needs a car?

So, in the shitty-childhood sample of three that is me and my siblings, one third of us is living an ok if rather dry and itchy life. If it were just me, maybe I wouldn’t have seen my family reflected in that lecture, or maybe I wouldn’t have cared so much. But it isn’t just me. And the other two thirds aren’t exactly smashing it. Life, that is. Even back when I was twenty-four some of the effects mentioned in the lecture were starting to become apparent. Over ten years on and between them they’re doing a cracking job working their way through the entire list of emotional and behavioural problems that come with having a warped starting point.

When I was in that talk all those years ago I felt like the speaker was directly addressing me. Like they were giving me a rundown of my history and painting a picture of my future. That talk at that conference changed things for me. I started working harder, and perhaps only half-consciously at first, looking for evidence with fresh eyes, evidence to back up my theory. As my physical, and my siblings’ mental, health declined, my conviction only became stronger. I started following those suicidal spiders, the Atypena lentil, more closely, despite how much their spindly little legs creeped me out, looking for something that maybe only someone like me could look for. And when I found what I was looking for, as all evolutionary psychologists and biologists eventually do, I felt this was my calling. As awful as it was, I even started to feel some small amount of pride in my past, because it had given me the capacity to see the evolutionary benefit of something as dark as suicide. A discovery like that wasn’t for someone normal to unearth, someone good, it was for someone like me. My childhood had sharpened my mind and deadened my emotions enough to make me less attached to human life than I might otherwise have been. I guess even back then I knew I was the metaphorical egg, not the coffee bean or even the carrot. And I was glad, at that time, to be an egg. Only an egg could do the work I was doing.