The boredom and shame at just waiting for death.

I watch people doing difficult, unpleasant, dangerous and even life- and disability-threatening things, and they seem to enjoy it.

So why can't I enjoy the terrors and near misses, the feelings of almost certain ruin, that I encounter? The highs and lows of the ride to nowhere.

This is boring. This isn't the best use of life. And all I can think of to make it better is self-harm, as in food, drink, sloth, and so on, because any concrete steps towards making things better seem far out of reach, even if obvious: improve my mental, physical and financial health, make friends and get better hobbies. Start doing things I'm proud of, stop obsessing over poverty, madness and death.

I was so anxious to avoid responsibility, challenge and hard work that life passed me by, happening to some other people while I simply got older.

I didn't notice that most people had plans, and were trying to achieve them, until I came up with one or two of my own.

At that point, well into mid-life, it seemed absurd to tell people what I'd learned, absurd to tell people anything at all. Because my whole story could be dismissed in a sentence or two, the set up for a joke without a punchline, a slight tension that never pays off.

I was always interested in dropouts, refuseniks and people who lived outside the mainstream, who didn't play the usual “accrue resources” game, but wandered off and did their own thing, and still got housed, fed and loved.

This seemed way better than towing the line and feeling bitter and frustrated as the years turned to nothing, waiting for real life to begin.

Of course, I tended to ignore the fact that many of these people only existed in fiction, or ended up broken and broke, or were cushioned by wealth that enabled them to take refuge in the arts and launder their inheritances.

I was on the wrong kind of outside looking in. Without talent, drive, connections or money, without even much interest beyond myself and my own immediate vices.

When looked at in a cool, dispassionate manner, it’s amazing I’ve had any kind of success at all, never mind a veneer, however thin, of modest respectability, or at least not too obvious a loser and creep.

My mistake, or misfortune – if it is one – is to be satisfied with small things.

It’s happiness that leads to my regret.

From one angle a life of relative freedom and ease, from another a life of sour grapes and cope, both lived in the shadow of addiction and compromise.

I knew that I would live and die without influence, but I wasn't concerned about death until I had a child, and then it became (almost) all-consuming - the shame at what I would leave behind.

I was born in the center of a labyrinth with my eyes shut and ears closed, crawling on my hands and knees and determined to find my own way rather than follow others who'd escaped.

This was just one of my mistakes.