IT WAS A CLASSIC MALE RESPONSE TO DEPRESSION: MATES, BOOZE AND DENIAL

church, I finally came to my senses aged 21. Recognising the illogicality and hypocrisy of my upbringing, I chose to walk away, even though I knew it meant having to start my life all over again. I was effectively saying goodbye to my childhood friends for ever and I knew almost nothing about how to navigate life as a freethinking adult.

The first few months were tough but, in typical male fashion, I didn’t confide in anyone about the challenges I was facing. I simply told myself to get on with it. Like many people in my family, I had often struggled with feelings of sadness and worthlessness, but from that point in my life the lows started to become more pronounced. By then I was living in Hong Kong – under British rule at the time, and an easy choice for someone escaping their family’s self-inflicted dramas. I found a job with a well-known publisher and started building a new life. In Hong Kong’s heavy- drinking expat culture, superficial friendships were easy to make, and release and oblivion were always within reach. It was a classic male response to depression: mates, booze and denial. And that’s how it continued for years.

By my late 20s, I should have seen the telltale signs. I had been on a number of dates but still hadn’t formed any significant relationships. More than once I’d been told I was impossible to reach emotionally, and behind my back I sensed that some friends and acquaintances were quietly telling one another that I drank too much. But still no one said it to my face. In fact, I was the go-to person for a fun night out, guaranteed to keep going until the very end.

Then my father died. I had only started getting to know him in my mid-20s, by which time we were living 6,000 miles apart. But the relationship grew slowly through regular phone calls and occasional visits to England. We were planning our first-ever holiday together when he told me that he hadn’t been feeling well, and his doctor wanted to send him for further tests. Not long after that, he was dead from colon cancer.

In the year that followed, two of my close friends died in separate accidents. The combined grief was overwhelming. There were many times when I felt I couldn’t even breathe, yet I responded by keeping the emotions in; quietly adding my grief to a long list of things that I didn’t want to think about. I pretended that everything was fine even when it clearly wasn’t, and the result was a numbness and detachment from the world around me that only heightened my growing sense of isolation.

I can still recall the yearning to connect with other people, to do all the things that seemed so easy for everyone else – the physical contact, the companionship, the emotional intimacy – but I didn’t know how. It was as though I didn’t have the emotional software to let people close; as if I was wired differently. By that time, the depressive episodes were becoming worse and I handled them the only way I knew how: I spent more time alone. Drinking, anger and overwork became familiar friends.

After more than 15 years living in Hong Kong and Shanghai, I moved back to Europe, to Berlin, in the summer of 2010. I still hadn’t told anyone about the growing pain inside me, instead immersing myself in yet more work. I began writing my first novel, juggling that workload with the heavy demands of my career. It wasn’t long before I was having to start work every day at 4am, pushing through a weekly schedule that was so intense there was almost never an opportunity to think about myself. It was the perfect cover for keeping everyone else at a distance: ‘I’d love to see you but I’m just too busy.’ My personal circumstances – living alone and working from home – made it easy to hide my darkest moments. When I did go out, I knew through years of practice how to prepare myself for social occasions, always putting my best face forward. I’d become a grand master at hiding my problems. Partly because I wanted to, partly because I felt I needed to.

You can keep that up for only so long before it goes horribly wrong. Every day became a struggle: I was waking up each morning wanting to die and my inner critic, who had always been a harsh taskmaster, was screaming at me that the world would be a better place if I were dead. Which is how I found myself that night in 2014 pondering the final details of my suicide. As practical and organised as ever, I had already