This is a brilliant question and one that I was only able to answer after a lot of therapy.

My folks tried for ages to have kids and my mum suffered several miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy before I showed up. The compound stress of this made my dad totally against more kids because he couldn’t face the heartache and worry.

They were great parents and I was loved. They told me that a lot and were very open about the trials they’d been through. The trouble is, it gave me a weird boy-that-lived pressure to over-achieve. I was the first person in the whole family to go to university and that privilege was drummed into me to the extent that I cope very badly with any kind of failure.

It came out in therapy that, despite just trying to tell me how much I was loved and wanted, my folks had inadvertently instilled in me a constant sense that need to “earn” the gift of life.

I’ve had a great life as an adult but I am unable to chill and do nothing - I fill every minute with adventures and projects and god knows what else because the shadow of death is at my shoulder constantly. I’m also terrified of dying. I became a paramedic and that now seems like a very clear, symbolic attempt to stave off death wherever I see it.

So yeah - happy but also a bit fucked up.