Preface

The opening of The Squeaky Wheel

One of my earliest memories is standing at the top of a rickety, hard, wooden staircase in our council house, knowing I couldn’t make it down alone.
I was born deaf, with no balance and limited motor skills. The world tilted and spun in unpredictable ways, and my small body hadn’t yet learned how to trust the ground. I remember gripping the chipped paint of the banister, feeling the splinters bite into my palm, and understanding, long before I had words for it, that there was no safe way forward.
So I did what I would spend much of my early life doing: I let go. I accepted the inevitable pain and dropped. I knew no other way.

My parents were visited by local authorities more than once during those years - too many bruises, too many explanations. When the doctors finally diagnosed my ear problems, the relief for my parents might have been a much-needed relief. An acknowledgement that they weren’t failing. At least now, someone could name it. For them, it meant the world would stop assuming the worst. For me, it was the beginning of another kind of story: a life spent learning how to fall, how to brace, and eventually, how to stand.

It turns out that some of us are born already halfway to fragile. Depression and anxiety are thought to be thirty to forty percent heritable; the rest, they say, is circumstance. That number has always felt too tidy to me, as if we could apportion suffering, as if pain obeyed percentages. Still, there is comfort in the idea that my particular restlessness wasn’t entirely of my own making. I was born into a body wired for static, a nervous system tuned to noise.

Alain de Botton once said that our lives are rarely as free as we imagine. Broken men, he writes, are built slowly - layer upon layer of small disappointments, unspoken fears, misplaced hopes. My own construction was quiet and ordinary: the child who learned to accept suffering as inevitable, the teenager who tried to fix it through love, the adult who believed that success could outwork pain. Each phase just another version of falling, always certain the landing would hurt less next time.

When I began writing what became The Squeaky Wheel, I wasn’t setting out to write a book. I was trying to make sense of the noise - the hum of anxiety, the ache of depression, the endless replay of old scripts. The pages started as therapy notes, then letters to myself, then stories that slowly revealed a pattern. Looking back, I see a single thread running through them: the search for safety in a world that kept proving it couldn’t be guaranteed.

Antonio Damasio once wrote that “much of each brain’s circuitry at any moment in adult life is individual and unique - truly reflective of that organism’s history and circumstances.” That line has followed me for years. We are what we have been shaped to be: the sum of every shock absorbed, every kindness received, every silence endured. There is no single cause of pain, no one trauma to name and resolve, only a lifetime of small calibrations that teach the body what to expect from the world.

For a long time, I thought healing meant erasing those calibrations - starting over. But now I think it’s about learning the map of them. Understanding the way they were drawn, the stories they tell about what I believed I had to do to survive. My task wasn’t to rebuild but to recognise the architecture of what was already there, to see the cracks not as proof of failure but as openings through which light can reach.

It took decades to get to that point. By my forties, I was exhausted - mentally, physically, spiritually. I’d built a career that demanded presence while living a life ruled by absence. I had success by every public metric, yet inside, there was the same small boy staring down another staircase, still convinced that falling was the only option.

When I finally shared my notes with a therapist, it wasn’t bravery. It was surrender. I needed someone to witness the mess without looking away. For the first time, the story of my life wasn’t something to edit - it was something to examine. The therapist didn’t promise solutions. They asked questions. They listened. They helped me see that awareness itself was a kind of healing.

These pages grew out of that work. They are not instructions or affirmations. They are fragments of a life examined under gentler light. A record of the ways anxiety and depression can be both inherited and learned, both chemical and circumstantial, both curse and compass. I’ve come to believe that our suffering, when faced honestly, can become a guide, not because it is noble, but because it is true.

There is a moment, if you live long enough inside your own chaos, when you stop asking to be fixed and start wanting to be understood. That’s where this book begins.

The essays that follow trace the arc from breakdown to observation, from diagnosis to meaning, from silence to something like speech. They are, in their way, love letters to the parts of us that survived when nothing made sense.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that pain loses a little of its power when it is witnessed, when someone else says, I see you there at the top of the stairs. This book is my way of saying it back.

Read it however you need to: in fragments, in order, or not at all. Let it be what it is - a quiet testimony that sometimes the act of naming our hurt is enough. That even when we fall, there is grace in the attempt to stand again.