I’m David

I grew up religious, in a family and a wider world with very fixed ideas about how a man should be. Being myself clearly wasn’t on the menu, so I got very good at editing myself.

When I got out, I ran as hard as I could the other way: nightlife, apps, chemsex. I called it freedom, and for a while it was. When you spend your childhood being told your desire is wrong, going all the way to the other end feels like the only honest answer. What I couldn’t see was that I’d swapped one script for another, and this one had also decided who I was allowed to be.

Then the escape becomes the identity, and you stop being able to tell what you actually want from what you’re proving.

Nobody can ask you about that from the outside without sounding like they’re moralising, so mostly, nobody asks. That leaves two ways to look at it: shame or defence. Neither goes anywhere. The third conversation, honest and without judgement, is the one I couldn’t find. It’s most of why this exists.

I did the work: years of therapy, reading and searching, and a lot of genuinely useful insight. But most of the care I found wasn’t built for someone like me. It assumed a straight, neurotypical life, and I spent a lot of it translating myself before we could even start.

Therapy hit a wall I didn’t expect. I understood my patterns completely and still couldn’t change them.

Knowing exactly why you do something and doing it anyway is its own kind of despair. It turns into a fight with yourself that you lose every day.

When I started to slow down, the feelings I’d been running from came back, and they were enormous. Nobody warns you about that part. So I went looking for something to turn the volume down, and what I found took me most of the way to losing everything I had.

What came next was the hardest work of my life, and the first that actually moved: a nervous system I could live inside, tools that worked at 2am, and enough support to keep going when progress wasn’t linear.