“Who are you?”

I’m driving down the Pacific coastal road to LA with my fiancé and two of the most selfless and loyal friends I’ve ever had. If life is a journey, I feel I was always heading this way. I’m picking up things I loved from my childhood and making them work. Once I get home, I’m going to work hard to get back into university to follow a new career. I’m not going to try to be a writer anymore. That isn’t a job or an occupation I can aspire to do. That’s just something I’ve always been.

“Our absence was my language.”

I remember the agonising wait in that muggy basement, feeling increasingly sick as it gets closer to my turn. In the audience I hear my friends laughing at the others. I consider another cigarette but my mouth is dry and I know I’ll be sick. Suddenly Sarah’s up there. That means I’m on next. Oh my God, I’m on next. She finishes. Everyone claps. My heart is pounding. He calls my name. I step into the light and… don’t remember a thing. I’ve watched the video back since and don’t remember a thing about it.

“For the dawn.”

I was trying to escape. I’d set everything on relocating to Canada, perhaps seeking that feeling of home felt when I’d visited Vancouver years before. I even moved home to save money. Standing on the shores of English Bay in an impromptu birthday holiday, I thought this was where the story would end. But instead I soon found myself stranded. Mother kicked me out of the house and I lived off the charity of friends for several months. And I met a boy. Life doesn’t give you what you’re looking for. It gives you what you need.

“This is a war.”

When I quit my job they asked me where I was going to. I replied I was going to write. I received a pitying look in response, as if I hadn’t yet figured out how the world worked. As an unemployed writer I would sleep during the day, working all night finishing my novel, drinking black coffee and smoking roll-ups. Sometimes I’d walk the haunted streets and woods of old Highgate. At the time I felt impoverished, perhaps a little trapped by my choices, but responsible for it. Looking back I only remember feeling utterly free.

I’ve never been an “office job” person. By 26 I’d grown desperately unhappy, aware of time moving unbearably fast, frantically grabbing at each wasted second. I felt isolated, somehow exiled in London, desperate to escape. I remember once leaving work, inexplicably on the verge of tears, and staring at traffic on Euston Road. The city lights and sounds blurred and muffled past until I was suddenly in Leicester Square, hours later. My doctor called it a ‘fugue’; the conscious mind, unable to cope, essentially shuts down. It still happens when the moods swell dark enough, once or twice a year.

Twenty five saw the rise of the Canadians. If my life were a drama then this ‘season’ saw an influx of new characters, none of which I could now comprehend having ever lived without. We moved closer to Highgate Cemetery, its legendary cobbled streets often echoing ghostly carriage-wheels clattering across them. It all felt like something was beginning in my life. As usual, looking back, I was then too impatient to understand what it was. I was in a Wildean prime of youth: confident, solvent, inspired, capable and unafraid. The world was my oyster, and everything suddenly within easy reach.

I discovered I was allergic to blonds far too late. One in particular took me to Vancouver; the first place I’d felt at home since university. While there I took an Amtrak to Seattle to visit my older brother, following the Pacific coast under a full moon. When I arrived we hugged awkwardly. “There’s no easy way to say this,” he said, and told me our uncle was dead. Cancer. We spent the night sitting on his porch drinking beer and smoking cigarettes like two kids from a John Hughes movie, sharing memories of the man who’d shaped our childhood.

Graduation was intense; I moved back to London without focus or direction. I started a beautifully destructive and turbulent relationship. We no longer speak. I moved to Highgate, but fell out with a friend over trivialities like washing-up and laundry. In autumn my mother developed cancer and I moved home to look after her between hospital visits. Writing feverishly, I produced my best pieces, was finally published and won first prize in an international competition. Months later I still hadn’t found a job. I fell apart and my doctor reluctantly prescribed antidepressants. Happiness became meaningless because I couldn’t feel sad.

Anyone who’s done Edinburgh will tell you it’s incredible. You meet so many people: both rising new talent and veteran faces of stage and screen. When not performing, flyering or watching shows we’d grab unhealthy snacks from Piemaker, sing songs on the Royal Mile about Jenny Bond selling used underwear on the internet or grab brief rests over sticky pub tables of beer and burgers for five pounds. The venue we played at has since become an Indian restaurant. One of us became a successful standup comedian, the other a successful musician. The third tried to become a writer, unsuccessfully.

My abiding memory of my 21st birthday was sitting beside a dual-carriageway in Victoria eating soggy overpriced sandwiches as I watched the traffic pass. My mother later pretended she hadn’t forgotten by rushing to Sainsbury’s before closing to buy a fruit salad spongecake, gone soggy from being left out all day. Realising that all my friends leaping out to shout “surprise!” was increasingly unlikely, I drank a bottle of Soave, smoked cigarettes and went to bed, drawing a veil over the whole empty, soggy experience. Ever since I’ve not bothered much with birthdays. Why even try to top that little winner?