The Long Way Home

Author's Note

This book is the story of a life that did not follow a straight line. I was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1965. Much of my childhood and adolescence was spent in institutions: boarding schools, hospitals, juvenile detention and, later, a hotel school I never chose. Those years shaped me long before I had the language to understand trauma.

What followed was not a simple journey from suffering to recovery. I became a soldier, a tank commander and drill instructor. I taught myself computing after a broken relationship and entered the technology world through IBM and AT&T. I joined a humanitarian convoy to Ukraine in the aftermath of Chernobyl. In January 1994, I bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok, lived on the streets, hustled for tailor shops, overstayed my visa and came dangerously close to losing everything before a computer and graphic-design job gave me another chance.

Thailand, Vietnam, business, Buddhism and trauma work eventually became parts of the same life. I built companies, worked with the Vietnam News Agency, became ordained as a Buddhist monk, and later devoted my work to people carrying trauma, PTSD, depression and abuse. This is not a story about becoming untouched by the past. It is about discovering that the past does not have to decide what the rest of a life is for.

Introduction - The Man and the Boy

At sixty-one, I spend much of my life sitting opposite people who believe that something inside them has been permanently damaged. They arrive carrying fear, shame, anger, grief and the conviction that life has narrowed to what happened to them. I know that conviction well.

There was a time when I was the child adults moved from one place to another, the boy inside hospitals and institutions, the teenager whose future appeared to be decided by other people. There were years when survival mattered more than direction. There were years when I confused movement with freedom and achievement with recovery.

The distance between that boy and the man I became is the subject of this book. The road went through institutions, military service, computers, humanitarian work, Bangkok streets, corporate offices, Vietnam, entrepreneurship, monasteries and finally trauma therapy. It was a very long way home.

PART ONE - THE BOY

Institutions, separation and the making of a survivor

Chapter 1: Schoten, 1965

I was born Dirk, Johanna, Jozef Paeshuys on Thursday, November 18, 1965, at five o'clock in the afternoon in Schoten, a small suburb just outside Antwerp in the north of Belgium. It was already deep winter by then, bitterly cold and snowing, the sort of November afternoon when the light disappears early and the cold seems to settle into the buildings and streets. I know the date and the hour with precision, but almost everything else about those first years comes to me in fragments. I have very few clear memories of early childhood, and much of what I understand now comes from looking back across six decades and trying to make sense of a family and a little boy who, at the time, had no language for what was happening around him.

From the outside, my beginnings probably looked comfortable and respectable. My father came from an established family business. My grandfather owned a substantial printing company, employing around twenty-five people and operating large offset presses. This was not a small neighborhood shop printing business cards and leaflets. They produced high-quality reproductions of paintings by Rubens and other artists, and the company also carried out work for the Belgian royal family and the Royal House. There was status in the business, pride in the family name, and the kind of expectation that often travels quietly from one generation to the next.

My father was the oldest son, and because he was the oldest son, his future had effectively been chosen for him. He was expected to continue the printing business. The problem was that it was not the life he wanted. His ambition had been to become a veterinarian. He loved animals and wanted to study veterinary medicine, but my grandfather would not allow it. Duty came first, the family business came first, and my father stepped into a role that had been prepared for him whether he wanted it or not.

I understood none of this as a child. To me, he was simply my dad, and my memories of him are overwhelmingly good. He was a very kind man and, with me, a loving and attentive father. One of the images that has stayed with me is sitting on his lap when I was very small while he slowly drove his Porsche 911 into the garage after coming home from work. I can still picture that little boy, perched there in front of him, allowed to feel as if he were driving the car himself. It is a small memory, almost ordinary, but perhaps that is exactly why it matters. It carries warmth. It carries safety. It is one of the few uncomplicated pictures I have from that period.

Only much later did I begin to understand how unhappy my father must have been in his own life. There is something painful about recognizing, decades afterward, that someone you loved had been living inside a future he did not choose. He did what was expected of him, ran the business, carried the responsibilities, and somewhere inside all of that lived the man who had wanted to become a veterinarian. He was also an alcoholic, although that word does not match the image most people would immediately imagine. I never saw him drunk, not once in my life. There were no memories of him stumbling through the house or becoming aggressive. Whatever relationship he had with alcohol was quieter than that, more private. I cannot know exactly what it did for him, but as an adult I can at least wonder whether it offered some relief from a life that never quite felt like his own.

There is an irony in his story that I could never have recognized then. My father's path had been decided for him by his father, and much of my own childhood would soon be decided for me by adults as well. Other people would determine where I lived, where I went to school, when I was allowed to come home, when I had to leave again, and which institutions would contain large parts of my childhood. Our circumstances were completely different, but the question of choice, of who gets to decide what a life should become, would run through both of our stories.

My mother came from an upper-middle-class family and was a housewife, which was common for women of her generation. I remember far less about the emotional atmosphere between my parents than I would like. I know now that their marriage was falling apart and that there was a great deal going on around me, but I was largely unaware of it at the time. They divorced when I was about five. I cannot give the reader a dramatic scene of the marriage ending because I do not have one. There is no clear memory of a final argument, a suitcase at the door, or somebody explaining to me what divorce meant. I simply know that the structure of the family changed, and very soon afterward my own life changed much more dramatically.

I had, and still have, a sister two years younger than me. Some of my early memories include her, but even that relationship became tangled with the sense that we were living two different versions of childhood. She was the normal child in my eyes. She was the girl who was loved, who was allowed to stay home, who seemed to belong naturally inside the family world from which I increasingly felt separated. I do not remember consciously blaming her for that, and I do not think resentment is the right word. It was more like envy in the purest childhood sense: she appeared to have access to something I desperately wanted and did not know how to obtain. She was allowed to be a child in a way I did not feel I was.

Even before the hospital years, I was not an easy, carefree little boy. I was extremely shy and anxious, and fear seemed to accompany me everywhere. Looking back now, I would describe myself as living in a near-constant state of fight or flight, although of course no six-year-old thinks in those terms. I did not know what a nervous system was. I only knew that I was afraid of what might happen next. I watched, I worried, I anticipated. The world did not feel like a place I could simply relax into.

Years later I would encounter diagnostic language that helped explain parts of how I experienced the world. I was diagnosed with ADHD and with what was then called Asperger's, and there were later questions around borderline personality disorder as well. I also came to understand that I had unusually high emotional sensitivity and an above-average IQ, measured at 132. None of those labels existed for the little boy in Schoten. They came much later. At the time, I was simply the child who seemed different, the child who felt too much, noticed too much, worried too much and found it difficult to fit comfortably into the world around him.

I was mostly on my own. I do not remember a circle of childhood friends or the easy social life that other children seemed to have. What I remember more clearly is a sense of separation that went deeper than ordinary loneliness. I later came to call it dissociation and alienation. As a child, I had no such vocabulary. The best description I have ever found is much simpler and stranger: I felt as though I did not belong on Earth, as though the mothership had left without me. It sounds almost humorous when said out loud, but the feeling itself was anything but funny. It captured the profound sense that everybody else had somehow received the instructions for being human and I had missed the briefing.

That sense of being different was not a philosophical idea. It was physical. It lived in the body as anxiety, in the mind as fear, and in relationships as distance. I did not feel that I had necessarily done something wrong. I simply felt unlike everyone else. There seemed to be a normal world in which children lived with their families, went to school, came home again, had friends, were comforted when they were frightened and knew, at some basic level, where they belonged. I could see that world, particularly through my sister, but I increasingly felt that I was standing outside it.

When I was around six, I was sent to an asthma clinic on the Belgian coast in De Haan. I would remain there for roughly two years. The full story of that institution belongs later in this book because it deserves more than a few paragraphs. It was one of the defining experiences of my childhood and one of the sources of trauma I carried for decades. I was already very sick with severe asthma, and the place itself was clinical, rigid and profoundly lacking in warmth. There were endless medical procedures and tests, some of which I experienced as experiments, compulsory physical training, running on the beach, and time in a saltwater pool whether I wanted it or not. What remains strongest, though, is not any single procedure. It is the loneliness and the absence of loving kindness.

My maternal grandparents lived on the coast, not far from the institution, and sometimes they would collect me for a weekend. Those weekends were enormously important. For a brief time, I could step out of the clinical world and into something that felt closer to ordinary family life. I was looked after, supported and allowed to experience the relief of being somewhere else. But the relief always came with a clock attached to it. As the weekend moved toward Sunday afternoon, the knowledge that I had to go back began to take over. Comfort and dread became linked together. The safer I felt with my grandparents, the more painful the approaching return became.

Sunday afternoons would haunt me for years. Long after the hospital was gone, long after boarding schools had ended, and long after I had become an adult with a completely different life, Sunday afternoon could still bring an anxiety attack. That pattern stayed with me until my late thirties. For years I did not fully understand why that particular stretch of the week carried such weight. Eventually the connection became obvious. Sunday afternoon had been the time of return, the point at which a weekend of temporary freedom ended and I had to go back to the hospital or, later, to boarding school. My conscious memory might not contain a clear image of being sent away for the first time, but my body had apparently kept its own calendar.

What I missed during those years was not one particular person. I was not sitting in the institution longing only for my father or only for my mother. What I missed was something larger and more basic: a home, a family, and the chance to be a normal child. I wanted the ordinary things children should not have to think about wanting. I wanted empathy. I wanted love. I wanted reassurance. I wanted somebody to communicate, in whatever words a child can understand, that I was safe and that I belonged somewhere.

My father would die when I was fifteen, at only thirty-eight years old, so I never had the chance to know him properly as one adult knows another. I never sat down with him and asked what it had felt like to surrender his dream of becoming a veterinarian, whether he resented the print shop, what role alcohol played in his life, or what he had hoped for me when I was small. At fifteen, you do not yet know which questions will matter when you are sixty-one. By the time I knew what I wanted to ask, he was long gone.

When I look back at the little boy at the beginning of this story, I do not see a bad child or a problem child, although I am sure I could be difficult. I see a highly sensitive, frightened and isolated boy who was soon carried into circumstances he had no power to stop. If I could say anything to him now, it would not be some polished therapeutic message. It would probably be much more direct: you have no idea what you are about to get into. Hang on for dear life.

That may sound bleak, but I do not want the reader to pity him. Pity is not what that child needed then, and it is not what I want for him now. What he needed was empathy: somebody willing to understand that he had been placed on a ride he did not choose, a roller coaster already moving too fast, with no obvious way to get off. He needed someone to see that beneath the shyness, anxiety, sensitivity and difficult behavior was a boy trying to make sense of a world that did not feel safe and in which he did not yet know where home was.

The years that followed would teach me many ways to survive. It would take much longer to learn that survival and belonging are not the same thing.

Chapter 2: Different From the Beginning

Long before I had names for any of it, I knew that I was different. I did not understand why ordinary situations seemed to affect me more intensely than they appeared to affect other children. I only knew that the world felt loud, unpredictable and difficult to read, and that I moved through much of it in a state of fear. I was extremely shy, so shy that disappearing into the background often felt safer than being noticed. At the same time, inside me there was very little quiet. I worried, anticipated and watched constantly, as if something might happen at any moment and I needed to be ready for it.

The language came much later. As an adult I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism spectrum disorder, including what was then described as Asperger's, and I also came to understand that I live with face blindness. There were later questions around borderline personality patterns as well. I do not want to take those adult labels and paste them neatly onto a small child as though they explain everything, because they do not. But they gave me a framework for understanding why so many ordinary parts of childhood had felt unusually difficult from the inside.

I was also highly emotionally sensitive. Feelings did not arrive gently; they tended to arrive at full volume. Fear could become overwhelming very quickly, and when I could not escape physically, I often escaped in another way. Looking back, I recognize a strong tendency toward dissociation. At the time I had no word for it. I simply knew that I could feel detached from what was happening around me, as though part of me had stepped away from the situation because being completely present inside it was too much.

That sense of separation went beyond shyness. I often felt alien, not simply lonely but fundamentally out of place. The phrase I eventually found for it was that I felt as though the mothership had left without me. It sounds almost comic now, but it describes the experience better than any clinical term I learned later. Other people seemed to understand instinctively how to belong, how to recognize one another, how to move easily through relationships and social situations. I often felt as if everyone else had received a set of instructions that had somehow never reached me.

Face blindness added another layer to that confusion. Recognizing people was not always as automatic for me as it seemed to be for everyone else. Combined with intense shyness and anxiety, that could make social situations even more uncertain. I learned to depend on context, voices, mannerisms and other clues without understanding that I was compensating for anything unusual. I simply assumed that this was how I had to navigate people.

There was also a contradiction in me that adults may have found difficult to understand. I was frightened and withdrawn, yet I could also be impulsive, intense and difficult. I had an above-average IQ, measured later at 132, and I was endlessly curious about how things worked. My mind could focus obsessively on something that interested me while refusing to cooperate with situations that felt meaningless, frightening or imposed. From the outside, those differences could look like bad behaviour or defiance. From the inside, they were simply the way my mind and nervous system were operating.

I do not think the adults around me really understood what was happening. My mother, I am sure, knew that there were issues and that I was not developing in quite the same way as other children, but none of us had the language or understanding that would come decades later. In the 1960s and 1970s, a shy, anxious, emotionally intense boy who behaved unpredictably was more likely to be described as difficult than to have someone ask what his inner world actually felt like.

That distinction matters to me now. I was not a collection of diagnoses waiting to be discovered. I was a child trying to interpret a world that often felt overwhelming while having very few tools to explain myself to the people around me. The fear, dissociation, shyness, sensitivity and social confusion were already part of my landscape before the most difficult institutional years began. Then the circumstances of my childhood added another layer on top of them.

Looking back, I can see how easily temperament, neurodivergence and trauma became tangled together. Some things may have been present from the beginning. Other reactions were strengthened by what happened later. I cannot draw a perfect line between them, and I do not think I need to. What matters is that the little boy experiencing all of it did not know why he felt different. He only knew that he did - and that the world rarely slowed down long enough to help him understand it.

Chapter 3: Sent Away - Learning to Survive

I do not remember the day I was sent away. There is no clear image of a suitcase, a doorway, a goodbye or the journey to the Belgian coast. My conscious memory begins after the decision had already been made and I was simply there. I was about six years old when I was placed in an asthma clinic in De Haan, a coastal town in Belgium, and I would remain there for roughly two years.

My parents had divorced when I was around five, but at that age I had very little understanding of what was happening between the adults around me. I do not remember thinking that I had done something wrong, nor do I remember constructing any explanation for why I had been sent away. I only remember feeling different. I had always been extremely shy, anxious and fearful of what might happen next, and even before I had words such as dissociation, alienation or hypervigilance, I lived with the sense that I did not quite belong in the same world as everyone else.

Years later I found a phrase that came closest to describing the feeling: it was as though the mothership had left without me. Everyone else seemed to have received some basic set of instructions about how to belong to a family and move through ordinary life, while I was standing outside it looking in. My younger sister, two years younger than me, became part of that contrast in my mind. I loved her, but as a child I also envied her because she seemed to be the normal child. She was the girl who was loved, who stayed home, and who appeared to have access to the kind of ordinary family life that increasingly felt unavailable to me.

What I missed was not one particular person. I was not lying awake longing only for my father or only for my mother. I missed the whole idea of home. I missed having a family around me and being allowed to be an ordinary child. More than anything, I missed empathy, love and reassurance: the simple sense that somebody understood that I was frightened and would stay close enough to make the world feel safe.

Being sent to De Haan was the first major rupture I can identify in that early life, even though I cannot remember the moment of departure itself. In the years that followed, being sent away would become almost normal: hospitals, boarding schools and other institutions would repeatedly decide where I slept and how I lived. At six, I had no language for any of that. I only knew that the roller coaster had started moving, and there was no obvious way to get off.

My earliest clear memories of the institution are not of classrooms, games or other children. They are of the infirmary, the medical ward where we were taken when we were too sick to participate in the normal daily routine. I had severe asthma, and there were periods when breathing itself demanded most of my attention, so the infirmary became a familiar place.

The room was long, cold and clinical, with around twenty beds arranged in two rows, ten on the left and ten on the right. The beds stood so close together that there was barely enough room to move sideways between them. The lighting was poor and subdued, and the room carried the unmistakable smell of medical disinfectant and antibacterial cleaning products. Underneath that smell was the sound I remember most clearly: coughing, wheezing and children struggling for breath. The clinic mainly treated children with severe asthma and children with skin diseases such as eczema, so illness was not an interruption to life there; illness was the atmosphere in which life took place.

What frightened me most was the staff. The nurses could be rough, and we learned to dread their approach because it usually meant that something was about to be done to us. There was very little explanation, tenderness or reassurance. Medical procedures were simply part of the routine, and as children we were expected to comply.

One memory has remained particularly clear. Several times a day our temperature was taken rectally. We were required to pull down our clothes and lie in position while the procedure was carried out, with virtually no privacy from the other children in the ward. At six years old I did not have the vocabulary to describe what that did to me. I only knew that I hated it. Looking back, I can recognize both the physical invasiveness and the complete powerlessness of having no choice over what was being done to my body.

There was very little in the institution that felt safe or comforting. I was already extremely ill with asthma, yet the daily regime could include mandatory physical training, running on the beach and being made to use the saltwater swimming pool. From the perspective of the institution these things may have been regarded as treatment, exercise or rehabilitation. From the perspective of the child inside it, they were simply more demands imposed by adults who already controlled almost every part of the day.

My maternal grandparents lived on the coast not far from the clinic, and every second or sometimes every third weekend they might collect me and take me home with them. Those visits were deeply refreshing and supportive because, for a short while, I could step outside the institution and experience something that resembled ordinary family life. But the relief came with a price, because from around noon or early afternoon on Sunday I would begin to feel intense anxiety and dread about having to return.

This is a blunt fact: Sunday afternoons became a trauma trigger that followed me for decades. We would usually leave my grandparents' home at around four o'clock, and the drive back to the institution took only about half an hour, but the real ordeal began hours earlier. The anxiety slowly built from lunchtime onward as I watched the remaining freedom disappear. That long emotional countdown felt torturous, and the pattern stayed with me until I was in my late thirties. Even after the hospital and boarding schools were long behind me, Sunday afternoons could still produce the same anxiety response.

I would understand much later that my mind did not need to hold a clear picture of being sent away for my nervous system to remember what Sunday meant. The body had learned the timetable. Relief could disappear. Safety could end. Home could be temporary. So I learned to watch, anticipate and prepare myself for what was coming next. At the time I would never have called that survival. It was simply how I got through the day.

Chapter 4: The Hospital Years

When I think back on the hospital years, I do not remember them as a continuous story. I was very young, and most of the time I was simply trying to get through one day and then the next. Survival did not feel heroic or even conscious. It was just the state I lived in. Much of those two years has disappeared into the distance, but certain scenes remain with extraordinary clarity, as though my memory selected a handful of moments and refused to let them go.

One of those memories is the tunnel. The clinic stood close to the Belgian coast, surrounded by large sand dunes. Walking over the dunes to reach the sea was difficult, so a tunnel had been built through them. We walked through it many times. To an adult it might have been nothing more than a practical passage to the beach, but to me it felt long, dark and frightening. I remember entering it and feeling enclosed by the darkness, knowing that the only way forward was to keep walking until the light appeared at the other end. Decades later, that tunnel remains one of the clearest physical images I carry from De Haan.

Night brought a different kind of fear. There was a security guard who made rounds through the institution carrying a flashlight. I was terrified of him. I would lie in bed and hear his footsteps approaching through the corridor, getting closer and closer, while pretending to be asleep. He moved from bed to bed and sometimes shone the flashlight directly into a child's face. I learned to keep my eyes closed, control my breathing and wait for the beam to pass. Only when the footsteps began to fade could I begin to relax again. The sound of someone walking the halls at night, the anticipation of that light reaching me, stayed with me for years afterward.

During the day, the institution had its own school. We attended classes for only four half-days each week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Wednesday was a day without school. Even education took place inside the clinic, fitted around the routines of treatment and institutional life. We did not leave the hospital to attend an ordinary school and then return. The classroom was simply another part of the same contained world. Looking back, that detail matters because it shows how complete the institution had become. Medical care, sleeping, eating, exercise and schooling all happened inside the same system.

Another memory is the kitchen in the basement. I can still recall the smell more strongly than almost anything else about it. It was an industrial kitchen preparing food for what must have been several hundred people, and there was a tremendous stench that I can only describe as rotten or vile. The smell seemed to hang in the basement. The food itself was equally memorable for all the wrong reasons. It was heavily overcooked, dominated by carbohydrates and rarely felt fresh. Even by the standards of institutional or hospital food, I found it disgusting. For a child who already felt that he had very little control over his surroundings, meals were simply another part of life that had to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Then there was the medical wing, where we underwent tests and procedures. X-rays were common, and when my asthma became severe and my chest was heavily congested, there was a treatment that we children called 'the rack.' I do not know whether the staff used that name; it was the name that stayed in my memory. I would be strapped onto a board and tilted until I was upside down. A nurse or therapist would then strike or rhythmically tap my back with their hands in an effort to loosen the mucus in my lungs. The purpose was to bring the phlegm up so that I could cough it out and breathe more freely.

There may have been a perfectly understandable medical reason for the procedure, but that is not how a frightened child experiences being strapped to a board and turned upside down. At that age I did not separate treatment from fear. I only knew that adults controlled what happened to my body, that resistance was pointless, and that I had to endure the procedure until it was finished. The physical relief that sometimes followed did not erase the experience of powerlessness while it was happening.

That sense of powerlessness connected many of the memories from De Haan. It was present in the infirmary with its rows of beds, in the roughness of some of the nurses, in the repeated medical procedures, in the compulsory exercise, in the saltwater pool, and in the running on the beach even when I was already struggling with severe asthma. It was present at night when I listened for the guard's footsteps and during the day when every hour seemed to belong to somebody else's schedule.

What is striking to me now is how few of my memories involve comfort. I do not remember a member of staff sitting beside me and reassuring me when I was frightened. I do not remember someone explaining a procedure in a way that made me feel safe. Perhaps moments like that happened and I simply do not remember them, but they are not what remained. What remained were the tunnel, the flashlight, the medical smell, the basement kitchen, the coughing, the procedures and the knowledge that I had to make it through whatever came next.

There were, of course, moments outside the institution when my grandparents collected me and I was temporarily somewhere that felt more like family life. Those visits showed me that another world still existed. Yet even relief became complicated because it came with an ending. Sunday afternoon meant returning, and the dread often began around noon, hours before we left. By the time we got into the car at around four o'clock for the half-hour drive back, my body had already spent much of the afternoon preparing for the return. That reaction followed me into adult life and continued into my late thirties.

For many years I did not understand why Sunday afternoons could produce such intense anxiety long after there was no hospital and no boarding school waiting for me. Eventually the connection became impossible to miss. My conscious memory did not preserve every departure or every return, but something in me had learned the timetable. Sunday afternoon meant that safety was temporary. It meant that whatever brief experience of home I had been given was about to end.

I am careful now not to pretend that I can reconstruct every day of those two years. Memory does not work that way, especially when the memories belong to a very young child living in survival mode. I have fragments. But fragments can be enough. The fact that certain sounds, smells, places and sensations survived in my memory for decades tells me something about the intensity with which I experienced them.

The hospital years taught me to endure before I understood what endurance was. I learned to watch, to anticipate, to make myself small when necessary, to disconnect from what I could not control and to wait for difficult moments to pass. Those responses helped a frightened child survive an environment he could not leave. Much later, I would have to learn that the strategies that help a child survive are not always the strategies that allow an adult to feel safe, connected or at home in his own life.

Chapter 5: The Catholic Boarding School

After the hospital years, I did not simply return to an ordinary childhood. Around the age of nine or ten, I was sent away again, this time to a Catholic boarding school in Essen, in the north of Belgium. I stayed there for roughly two years. Compared with De Haan, the setting was different, but the underlying pattern was becoming familiar: once again, most of my life was being organized inside an institution rather than at home.

The school was academically demanding and very strict. It followed the kind of classical education that, in those days, was often seen as preparation for university and professions such as medicine. We studied subjects such as Greek and Latin, and the priests who ran the school expected discipline, concentration and hard work. I do not remember the priests as abusive. I have no memory of physical, emotional or sexual abuse there. What I remember is the strictness of the regime and the sense that very little room existed for a child who was already struggling to remain present in his own life.

The dormitories were divided into small sleeping cubicles, each with a curtain that gave us at least a little privacy. That detail has stayed with me more clearly than many of the lessons. Much of the rest of those years feels strangely empty. I do not remember joy, excitement or a feeling of belonging. When I look back, the word that comes closest is void.

I was profoundly dissociated. At the time, of course, I had no idea what that word meant. I only knew that I was very often somewhere else in my mind. I had almost no capacity to concentrate, memorize or absorb what was being taught. While the teacher or priest stood at the front of the classroom explaining Latin, Greek or another subject, I could be sitting at my desk physically present and psychologically hundreds of kilometres away.

My private world was much more interesting than the classroom. I imagined that I was a pilot, and very often a helicopter pilot, flying missions and going places far beyond the walls of the school. In my imagination I had movement, purpose and control. I could take off whenever I wanted. I could fly over whatever stood in my way. Looking back, it is difficult not to see that fantasy as a form of escape. While the other boys were being taught, I was often flying.

The consequences showed in my grades. They were terrible. I was regularly at or near the bottom of the class, often the last student. I sometimes wonder how I managed to progress from one year to the next at all, and I believe there may have been a point when I had to repeat a year, although that part of my memory is not clear enough for me to state it as a certainty. What is clear is that the academic system interpreted the result - poor performance - while nobody seemed to ask what was happening inside the child producing it.

I did go home on weekends. By then we were living on a farm, with horses and other animals. Going home did not necessarily mean rest. There was work to do, and we were expected to help care for the animals and the horses. The farm gave me a different environment from the boarding school, but it was not a carefree weekend childhood either. During the week there was the discipline and academic pressure of the school; at home there were responsibilities and physical work. I do not remember many places in those years where I simply felt free to be a child.

There was one priest, however, whom I remember differently. He was a nice man, and when there was free time some of us would spend time with him. He had a tractor and an old car, and we would ride around with him across the large wooded property surrounding the school. Those are among the few genuinely pleasant memories I have from that period. They matter because I do not want to rewrite the past as if every person in every institution was cruel. He was kind to me, and kindness was memorable precisely because there was so little warmth in the larger emotional landscape I remember.

Life has a strange way of bringing certain people back into the story. Many years later, I would meet that same priest again during the humanitarian mission that took me to Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster. By then I was no longer the dissociated boy sitting in a classroom and flying helicopters in his imagination. I had crossed countries, careers and several versions of myself. His reappearance belongs properly to that later chapter, but the thread began here, in Essen.

When I think about those two boarding-school years now, I do not see a dramatic sequence of events. I see absence. I see a boy sitting in a demanding classroom without really being there, retreating into an internal world because the external one held very little joy for him. Dissociation allowed me to disappear without physically leaving. Nobody had to open a gate. I could simply take off in my mind.

That strategy came at a cost. It protected me from some of what I was feeling, but it also made learning, friendship and ordinary participation in childhood extraordinarily difficult. I had no close friends that I remember. My grades collapsed. I moved through the institution in a kind of emotional fog. The world wanted concentration and achievement from me; what I was capable of offering at that stage was survival and imagination.

By the time I left Essen, being sent away had become less an exceptional event than a pattern in my life. Hospital, boarding school, weekends home, then away again. I was learning that a person could endure almost anything by leaving internally when leaving physically was impossible. It was an effective skill for a frightened child. It would take me decades to understand how difficult it can be to come fully back once disappearing has become automatic.

Chapter 6: The 9mm Weapon I Took to School, 1977

In 1977, when I was twelve years old, I took a Second World War-era machine gun (9mm Sten-Gun) to school. Written as a single sentence, it sounds reckless to the point of absurdity, and of course it was. But the event did not begin at the school gates. It began in the basement of my grandparents' house, in a place that had already become part punishment chamber and part forbidden territory in my childhood imagination.

We spent a great deal of time at the home of my father's parents. My grandfather was the patriarch of the family, a very strict and dominant man, and punishment in his house could take different forms. One of them was being made to stand in the toilet. Another was being sent to the basement. Even the basement punishment had its own scale of severity: lights on or lights off, at the top of the stairs, halfway down, or at the bottom. The worst version was simple and effective - the bottom of the stairs with the lights switched off.

I became very familiar with that basement. Fear and familiarity have a strange way of learning to live beside each other. When I was not being punished and the lights were on, the place also became a world to explore. I would snoop around, opening things, looking behind boxes and searching for whatever hidden treasure an old family house might contain. I was a curious child, and forbidden spaces always seemed to promise that there was something worth discovering if I looked hard enough.

One day I found it. Hidden carefully inside a canvas bag was a Sten gun, a nine-millimetre automatic weapon left over from the Second World War. To a twelve-year-old boy, it was an extraordinary object. It was heavy with history and danger, although at that age I was far more aware of the fascination than the danger. I did not look at it and think about what a weapon like that had been designed to do. I saw a machine, a mystery, something secret and powerful that had been hidden in the basement for years.

I became obsessed with it. I began handling it, studying it and taking it apart, then putting it back together again. Over time I became so familiar with the weapon that dismantling and reassembling it became almost a private hobby. There was something deeply satisfying to me about understanding how a mechanical object fitted together. Long before computers entered my life, I was already drawn to systems, components and the question of how things worked.

But fascination has a way of pushing against boundaries. Eventually it was no longer enough that the Sten gun belonged to the secret world of my grandparents' basement. I wanted it for myself. So I dismantled it into separate pieces and, over time, smuggled those pieces out of the house and back home, where I hid them under my bed. At twelve, I experienced this as cleverness. I had taken something forbidden, moved it without being discovered and created a secret that belonged only to me. I did not yet have the maturity to appreciate how serious that secret really was.

Then came the idea that changed everything: I wanted to show it to my friends.

I put the weapon into a small wooden case and took it to school. It was a government school, and to my twelve-year-old mind the plan was driven by excitement more than anything else. I imagined the amazement on my friends' faces. I wanted to show them something none of them had ever seen up close. I was not walking into school with the adult understanding of what it meant to bring an automatic weapon onto school grounds. I was a boy carrying an object that had become, in my mind, part trophy, part machine and part secret identity.

My friends were, unsurprisingly, astonished. But the excitement did not last long. One of them went to the headmaster and reported that I had brought a weapon to school. The private adventure ended almost immediately and the adult world arrived with a force I had not anticipated.

The police came, not uniformed officers casually sent to deal with a schoolboy prank, but plain-clothes detectives from a specialist unit. They treated the situation seriously because it was serious. Whatever story I had been telling myself about the weapon collapsed the moment those men entered the picture. The Sten gun was no longer an exciting object from my grandfather's basement. It was evidence. Adults were asking questions. Authority had arrived, and this time there was no way to charm, hide or dismantle my way out of the consequences.

I sometimes think I may have been one of the first children of that era in Belgium to bring a Second World War automatic weapon into a school. Whether or not that is literally true is less important than how extraordinary the event was in 1977. School shootings were not part of the cultural vocabulary in Belgium. A child arriving at school with a weapon of war was not something teachers and police expected to encounter. I had crossed a boundary so far beyond ordinary misbehaviour that the adults around me had to respond accordingly.

The consequences were severe. There were punishments, investigations and repercussions that extended well beyond that day. The incident became part of the larger sequence of events that eventually contributed to me spending time in juvenile detention. It would be easy, looking back, to tell the story only for its shock value: the troubled twelve-year-old, the hidden machine gun, the school, the detectives. But that would miss the point.

I was a child shaped by fear, institutions, alienation and a constant search for something that made me feel powerful in a world where I often felt powerless. That context matters. It helps explain why a weapon hidden in a basement could become so fascinating to me. It helps explain the secrecy, the obsession and the excitement. But explanation is not the same as excuse.

I took the weapon. I hid it. I brought it to school. Those were my actions, and actions have consequences.

That distinction has become important to me as an adult and later as a trauma therapist. Trauma can explain behaviour without erasing responsibility for it. A frightened or dysregulated child may make choices that make perfect sense inside his own distorted map of the world and still cause real danger to himself and others. Compassion does not require pretending that every action was acceptable. Real compassion can hold two truths at the same time: this child needed help, and this child also had to learn that what he did mattered.

At twelve, I did not yet understand that balance. What I understood was much simpler. Something that had felt thrilling and secret had suddenly become frighteningly real. The detectives, the questions and the consequences taught me that there are moments when childhood fantasy collides with the adult world, and the adult world does not care how exciting the fantasy felt.

The Sten gun had started as hidden treasure in a basement. By the time the story ended, it had become something else entirely: one more step in the long education of a boy who was learning, often the hard way, that survival, freedom and responsibility are three very different things.

Chapter 7: Juvenile Detention

In June 1979, when I was fourteen, the adults around me had reached the point where they no longer seemed to know what to do with me. I was living with my mother and the man who had become her new husband, a person I experienced as frightening, dominating and deeply unstable. By then I already had a history of being considered a difficult child. The incident with the Sten gun at school had followed me, along with a handful of smaller problems that, taken together, had become part of the story adults told about me.

What I remember most clearly is the feeling that I was not wanted. I knew there was tension around me, and I knew that I had become a problem to be managed rather than a boy anyone seemed able to understand. Eventually I decided to run away from home and go to my father.

My father was by then in the final stages of alcoholism. He was deteriorating badly, and in my fourteen-year-old mind I had somehow decided that it was my responsibility to save him. Nobody appeared to be taking care of him, so I would. That was the logic. It was not the logic of an adult who understood addiction or the limits of what one person can do for another. It was the logic of a frightened son who loved his father and believed that perhaps, if he was there, something could be held together.

I ran away and went to stay with him. I did not get very far into that new plan before the police found me. What had felt to me like running toward my father was suddenly treated as though I had committed some kind of criminal act. I had not robbed anyone, assaulted anyone or committed a serious offence. I was a runaway child. Yet the response around me made the situation feel criminal, and I was told, in one form or another, that I needed to be taught a lesson.

The place they chose was a juvenile institution in Brasschaat called Vrij en Vrolijk - literally, 'Free and Happy.' Even now the name feels almost grotesquely ironic. Historically, Vrij en Vrolijk had begun in the 1930s as a Belgian youth-care and open-air-school initiative. By the 1970s, however, the institution had come under serious criticism over misconduct, mismanagement and abuse. It eventually ceased operating under that name in 1983. I knew none of that history when I was fourteen. To me, it was simply the place I was being taken.

Nobody presented it honestly. The whole thing was sugar-coated. I was told I was going somewhere that sounded almost like a summer camp, somewhere I might even enjoy myself. A man arrived in a car to collect me and spoke about the place as if an adventure was waiting. I remember the reassurance, the attempt to make it all sound exciting. Then we drove deep into a wooded area outside Antwerp, farther and farther away from anything familiar, until the truth became impossible to avoid.

This was not a summer camp. It was a locked juvenile facility.

The doors were controlled. Movement was controlled. Everything had rules, and the moment I understood that I could not simply walk back out, something in me changed. I was fourteen years old, surrounded by boys I did not know, many of whom had committed real offences, and I immediately felt that I had to become harder than I was. I had spent years learning that vulnerability could be dangerous. In that environment, on the first day, I decided I needed to establish very quickly that I was not someone to be pushed around.

It did not go according to plan.

At some point another boy said something to me - an insult, some piece of provocation that would probably be meaningless now - and I grabbed him. I wanted to dominate the situation before it could dominate me. I wanted him, and probably everyone watching, to understand that I was strong enough to defend myself.

He pulled a knife.

For a fraction of a second I believed it was real. My body reacted before my mind could catch up. I released him in surprise, and in that instant he dropped the knife and punched me directly in the mouth. Only afterward did I realize that the weapon he had produced was one of the small plastic knives used with meals, the sort of disposable utensil you might once have been given on an airplane. For half a second, however, none of that mattered. I saw a blade and believed I was in real danger.

The punch did real damage. My lower lip split badly against my teeth, leaving a cut of perhaps two or three centimetres inside my mouth. There was blood everywhere. It would not stop. I remember bleeding heavily and waiting for medical help while the inside of my mouth throbbed and swelled.

Hours later a doctor finally arrived. My memory of him is unmistakable: he had been drinking. He appeared intoxicated and irritated at having been called away, as though my injury had interrupted a family gathering or a party he would rather have stayed at. I asked for anaesthetic before he stitched my lip. He told me that the impact of the punch had already anaesthetised the area.

It had not.

By then hours had passed. I felt everything. They held me down while he stitched the inside of my mouth without anaesthetic. The pain was extreme. There are experiences from childhood that become blurred with time, but some remain sharp because there was nowhere for the mind to go while they were happening. That is one of them.

That was my first day in juvenile detention.

I stayed for three months.

The population was a mixture of children and teenagers, roughly from around ten to eighteen years old. Some had committed serious offences - robberies, hold-ups and other crimes that were completely outside my experience. I had arrived as a runaway whose family no longer knew what to do with him, and suddenly I was living among young offenders inside a regime that felt closer to a military boot camp than anything resembling care.

Privacy was almost nonexistent. The days were tightly controlled. We were expected to follow orders and we were put to work. Because the facility stood in the middle of the woods, there were tracks and roads that constantly needed maintaining. We moved dirt and gravel in wheelbarrows and carried out hard physical labour to make the roads more usable. It was not presented as some therapeutic exercise in responsibility. It was simply part of what life there required.

What made the experience even harder was that I was never given a clear release date. I did not know exactly how long I was going to be kept there. When a child does not know when confinement will end, time changes character. A week does not simply lead to another week; it becomes part of an open question. How long? What do I have to do? What do they want from me? When can I leave?

Eventually the answer arrived in the form of a choice that did not feel like a choice at all. I was told that if I agreed to attend hotel management school, I could leave juvenile detention. The school would be another boarding institution, this time on the Belgian coast in Koksijde, and I would spend the next four years training in hospitality - learning to become a chef or waiter.

I had absolutely no interest in it. None. It was not a career I had dreamed about, a subject that fascinated me or a direction I would ever have chosen for myself. But by then choice had become a very practical question. One option meant remaining locked inside Vrij en Vrolijk without knowing when I would be released. The other meant signing the agreement and getting out.

So I signed.

In September I was released and sent almost directly into boarding school again. On paper, I had been given an opportunity. From where I stood, I had simply exchanged one institution for another. The locks were different, the uniforms and rules were different, and the language used to justify the arrangement was different, but once again other people had decided where I would live and what my future would look like.

Looking back, I can see my own responsibility in parts of the path that brought me there. I had made reckless choices. I could be difficult, impulsive and defiant. The Sten gun incident was not harmless, and neither were all the other ways I tried to seize control when I felt powerless. I do not need to deny any of that in order to say something else that is equally true: I was also a fourteen-year-old boy in distress, trying to save an alcoholic father and trying to find somewhere he belonged.

Those two truths can exist together. A child can be responsible for his actions and still deserve adults who ask what is happening underneath them. Consequences can be necessary without humiliation, deception or abandonment being necessary. I would understand that distinction much later, both for myself and for the people I eventually worked with in trauma therapy. At fourteen, I understood none of it. I understood only that the promised summer camp had turned into three months of confinement, that my first day had ended with blood and stitches, and that the price of leaving was agreeing to spend the next four years studying something I did not want.

I had learned again that freedom could come with conditions attached.

Chapter 8: Nobody Asked

For most of my childhood, people seemed to have an opinion about me. I was difficult. I was strange. I was the child who did not fit easily into the places where adults expected children to fit. Years later, listening to my sister talk about those years, I understood that there had been a belief in the family that something was wrong with me, that I was simply a very difficult child. What is remarkable is that I never experienced myself that way. I never thought of myself as difficult. I did not wake up wanting to make life harder for anybody. From inside my own world, I was simply trying to live with feelings and circumstances I did not understand and could not explain.

The word that comes closest to describing how I felt is alienation. I felt profoundly unheard and misunderstood, but even those words do not quite capture it. Alienation was deeper. It was the sense that I was somehow outside ordinary life, watching other people belong to a world whose rules I had never been given. I felt like an outsider, an outcast, someone who had been left behind. I did not necessarily think I had done something terrible to deserve that position. I simply felt that I did not belong, and I had no language for why.

That is one of the most difficult things to understand about childhood when looking back as an adult. Today I can describe sensitivity, neurodivergence, dissociation, fear and trauma. At ten or twelve or fourteen, I could not. If an adult had sat beside me and asked, 'Dirk, how are you doing? How are you feeling? What is going on with you?' I am almost certain I would not have been able to give a sophisticated answer. I might have shrugged. I might have said I did not know. I might not have been able to say anything useful at all. But somebody still could have asked.

That is what shocks me most in retrospect. As far as I can remember, nobody ever genuinely asked me those simple questions. Adults dealt with my behaviour, made decisions about where I should live, decided what should happen next, and tried to manage what they saw as a difficult child, but I do not remember anyone sitting down with me and asking how I was actually feeling. Nobody asked what was happening inside me. Nobody asked what I was frightened of, what I needed, or why I was reacting to the world in the way I was. The behaviour was visible. The child underneath it was much harder to see.

I do not say that to accuse every adult around me of being uncaring. I cannot know what they thought, and I do not want to invent motives for people who are no longer here to explain themselves. They may have been overwhelmed by their own lives. They may genuinely have believed they were doing the right thing. The understanding of childhood, trauma and neurodivergence was very different in the 1960s and 1970s. I can only describe the experience from my side, and from my side the experience was that I was repeatedly acted upon without being understood.

Looking back, I believe I was an emotionally needy child. I use the word needy deliberately, but not as a criticism. I needed more reassurance, more kindness, more patience, more emotional attention and more sense of safety than many children probably did. Later in life, after learning much more about my own high emotional sensitivity, autism spectrum diagnosis - including what was then described as Asperger's - and above-average intelligence, I could see how these things may have combined into a kind of perfect storm. I experienced the world intensely. I noticed things intensely. I felt things intensely. I needed help regulating experiences that could overwhelm me, but neither I nor the adults around me had any framework for understanding that.

The painful irony is that the child who needed more often received less. Instead of additional warmth and reassurance, much of my early life involved separation, institutions, strict systems and adults whose role was primarily to supervise, treat, educate or control. The details of those experiences belong to the chapters before this one; what matters here is the cumulative effect. I was already a sensitive child, and then I found myself repeatedly in environments where emotional warmth was limited. I needed connection and often encountered structure. I needed reassurance and often encountered rules. I needed somebody to understand my inner world, while the adults around me mostly responded to what they could see from the outside.

I also want to be precise about the word trauma. I am not claiming that every child who lived through the same experiences would necessarily have been traumatized in exactly the same way. Two children can go through very similar circumstances and experience them very differently. Trauma is not only a description of the event; it is also about how that event is experienced by the person living through it. For me, many of those early experiences were profoundly traumatizing. What I wanted was painfully ordinary: to feel normal, to be loved and cared for, to be with my parents, and to have a safe home where I felt that I belonged. The distance between that simple wish and the life I was actually living was enormous.

There was one small moment during juvenile detention that has stayed with me because it was unusual. One of the educators saw me reading a book. I believe it was a book I had brought with me, although I no longer remember exactly which one. Her reaction surprised me. She seemed almost mesmerized by the fact that one of the boys there was sitting quietly reading. She asked about it, and at some point she told me that she did not think I belonged there. I do not remember a long therapeutic conversation following that remark, and I do not want to turn it into something larger than it was. What remained with me was simply that, for a brief moment, an adult had noticed something about me that did not fit the category into which I had been placed.

That comment mattered because so much of my childhood had been organized around categories. Difficult child. Bad student. Runaway. A boy who needed discipline. Yet I never recognized myself in those descriptions. I did not feel like a difficult child. I felt like a child trying to find a place where he could finally relax enough to feel safe. The fact that I often could not explain that did not make the need any less real.

The sense that I was living the wrong life became even stronger in my early teens. My younger sister began developing a passionate interest in motorsport and Formula One. Her room filled with racing posters. She was able to go to races and events, meet drivers and immerse herself in a world that fascinated me deeply. At the same time, my own life was moving toward a hotel school and a profession I had never chosen. I was envious, but not really of my sister herself. I was envious of what she was getting to experience. From where I stood, it felt almost as if our lives had somehow been swapped. She seemed to be living a version of the adventurous, mechanical life I wanted, while I was being sent in a direction that felt completely wrong for me.

At that age I also experienced hospitality work through the ideas about masculinity I had absorbed as a teenage boy. Cooking, service and training to become a maitre d' felt to me like the opposite of the mechanical, physical world I associated with the man I wanted to become. I would later discover that I could become very good at cooking despite having no desire to make it my life's direction, but that belongs to the next chapter. What matters here is the feeling I had at the time: once again, other people seemed to be deciding what my life should look like without asking who I actually was or what naturally drew me.

For a long time, I assumed that this was simply how childhood worked. Adults knew. Children obeyed. If a child could not adapt, the child was the problem. It took me many years to understand that there is an enormous difference between asking, 'What is wrong with you?' and asking, 'What happened to you?' There is an equally important difference between asking how to stop a behaviour and asking what that behaviour may be trying to communicate.

This became increasingly important to me later when I began working with trauma. I met people who carried tremendous shame about the ways they had behaved while trying to survive. Understanding the reason for a behaviour does not mean excusing everything a person does. Consequences still matter. Responsibility still matters. But responsibility and curiosity can exist together. Before condemning the survival strategy, it is worth understanding why it became necessary in the first place.

That understanding changed the way I looked back at the boy I had been. I could acknowledge that some of my behaviour was impulsive, reckless or difficult for other people to manage without accepting the conclusion that I was, at my core, a difficult child. The distinction matters. Behaviour is something a child does. It is not necessarily who the child is. A child can behave in ways that frighten or exhaust adults and still be frightened himself. A child can resist control because he is desperately trying to find some sense of control. A child can appear detached because being fully present has become too painful.

If somebody had asked me then what was wrong, I probably could not have explained any of that. Perhaps that is exactly why adults needed to ask more than once. A child should not need the vocabulary of a therapist in order to deserve curiosity. Sometimes being asked is itself part of the answer. It tells the child that someone has noticed, that his feelings matter, and that there may be a reason behind what is happening to him.

For years, the story around me was that I was difficult. The story inside me was that I was lost. I was highly sensitive, emotionally needy and profoundly alienated, and the things I experienced in childhood affected me deeply. I needed more love, more kindness and more understanding than perhaps an average child needed. Instead, I often received less. I cannot go back and give that boy the childhood he wanted, but I can finally give language to what he could not explain at the time. He was not asking to be excused from life. He was asking, without knowing how to say it, to be seen.

Nobody asked.

PART TWO - FOUR MORE YEARS AWAY

Hotel school and the final years before adulthood

Chapter 9: Hotel School

When I left juvenile detention in September 1979, I did not go home and begin again. I went almost directly from one institution into another. The condition of my release had already been made clear: if I agreed to attend hotel management school in Koksijde, on the Belgian coast, I could leave Vrij en Vrolijk. If I refused, I would remain in detention. I was fourteen years old, and whatever language the adults used around that arrangement, it did not feel like a choice to me. I signed because signing meant getting out.

Koksijde was a well-known hotel school, the kind of place whose name carried weight. The program lasted four years and was designed to train us across both sides of the hospitality trade. We learned the kitchen and the dining room, the skills required to become a chef as well as the formal service expected of a maitre d'. For someone who wanted that life, it could have been an excellent education. For me, it felt like four years spent walking in the wrong direction.

I had absolutely no interest in hospitality. None. I disliked the service side most of all. The work demanded a kind of polished attention to detail and social performance that I resisted from the beginning, and I also had a difficult relationship with many of the teachers. I came from Antwerp, while many of them were from the coast, and I experienced a strong prejudice against people from Antwerp. Whether every teacher actually felt that way or not, that was how the atmosphere registered with me. I felt singled out, disliked and already out of place before the lessons even began.

The boarding-school regime did not help. It was highly regimented and disciplined. We lived two boys to a room in small rooms inside a prefabricated building. After years in hospitals, boarding schools and juvenile detention, I had become familiar with institutions, but familiarity did not make them easier. I was deeply dissociated for much of those four years. I attended classes because I had to, learned what I had to learn when I could, and spent a great deal of time psychologically somewhere else. There was mischief, there were friendships and there were plenty of things going on that had very little to do with serious studying. Some of those stories belong elsewhere. The larger truth is that I was enduring another path somebody else had chosen for me.

What made the whole situation especially frustrating was that I was not a child without interests. Quite the opposite. From a very young age, I had been fascinated by mechanics and electronics. Machines made sense to me in a way many other things did not. My father used to tell a story about me running around with a screwdriver when I was only four or five years old. At one point I took apart one of his brand-new electric typewriters so thoroughly that a technician was called to put it back together and finally declared it beyond repair. From the adult point of view, I had destroyed an expensive machine. From mine, I had needed to know what was inside it and how it worked.

That curiosity never disappeared. I wanted to become a mechanic. It was probably the clearest career ambition I had as a boy. The irony was that my stepfather owned a British Leyland dealership, surrounded by the very world that fascinated me - cars, engines, Land Rovers, Jaguars and mechanical systems. Yet at some point he told me that I could study anything I wanted except mechanics. I still do not fully understand why. The one direction that genuinely interested me was the one direction I was told not to take. Instead, I found myself at a hotel school learning how to fold napkins, serve tables and train for a profession I had never wanted.

The kitchen was different. I still did not want to build my life around cooking, but there was something more concrete about it. There were tools, processes, timing and an immediate result. At some point I made a practical decision: if I had to do this anyway, I might as well learn to do it properly. So I did. I became a very good cook. Later in life I worked as a chef on several occasions and even ran a restaurant. People genuinely enjoyed my food. That remains one of the strange contradictions of those years: I became skilled at something I never wanted to become.

Being good at the kitchen did not transform me into a good student. I remained disengaged from much of the course, and the four years felt less like preparation for a future than a sentence with an end date. I was not building toward a dream. I was counting down toward eighteen, toward the point at which adults would finally have less power to decide where I had to live and what I was supposed to become.

Then came graduation day. There were roughly three hundred and fifty students, and as far as I remember every one of them received a diploma except me. We were handed formal folders, all looking more or less the same. Mine contained no diploma. Instead, there was a document confirming that I had attended the school for four years. I had made it all the way through the program and still had not technically graduated.

What is perhaps surprising is that I was not devastated. I did not particularly care about the diploma itself. What frightened me was being exposed. My mother had spent a great deal of money on the school and had often reminded me how expensive it was. After everything that had happened, telling her that four years of that expense had ended without a diploma felt impossible. I could already imagine the disappointment. So I did what I had become very good at doing when reality felt dangerous: I concealed it.

I never showed her what was inside the folder. Somehow the document disappeared, and my mother continued believing that I had graduated. My grandparents believed it too. The truth remained hidden for the rest of my mother's life. She died never knowing that I had been the one student standing at graduation with a folder that looked right from the outside and contained something entirely different on the inside.

The irony continued after the army. Because Koksijde had such a strong reputation, employers assumed that anyone who had spent four years there must have graduated. When I applied for work as a chef, I named the school. Nobody asked to see the diploma. The reputation of the institution filled in the missing piece for them, and I was able to work professionally in kitchens because, diploma or not, I actually knew how to cook.

Looking back, I do not think the lesson of hotel school is that I failed. I learned useful skills there, and I learned them well enough to use them later. The deeper problem was the absence of choice. A fourteen-year-old boy who was fascinated by engines and electronics had been placed on a four-year hospitality course because it was the price of leaving juvenile detention. My abilities were real, but the direction was not mine.

For much of my childhood and adolescence, adults seemed to confuse compliance with opportunity. If a path looked respectable, practical or prestigious to them, they assumed it should also be right for me. Koksijde taught me that a person can become competent at a life he does not want. I could cook beautifully, serve professionally when required and even find work in restaurants. None of that changed the fact that, inside, I was waiting for the day when I could finally decide for myself what came next.

At eighteen, that day was getting closer. At least that was what I believed.

Chapter 10: Forcefully Adopted

By the time I entered hotel school, another decision was being made about my life, one that I did not understand the weight of until many years later. My mother was married to the man who had become my stepfather, and at some point she introduced the idea that he wanted to adopt both my sister and me. It was presented to us as something positive, almost practical: we would become a family under one name, his name, Lambert.

There was another part of the situation that made the idea of choice even more complicated. My relationship with my stepfather was not a safe or easy one. I experienced a great deal of verbal and psychological abuse from him, and I learned to be careful around his moods, his judgments and the way he could dominate the emotional atmosphere of the house. Looking back, I see many of his behaviors as profoundly narcissistic. At the time I did not have that language. I only knew that opposing him, or openly resisting something that he and my mother wanted, did not feel like a realistic option. Against that background, being told that he wanted to adopt us did not feel like a simple family decision that two children were freely invited to consider.

I was still very young, coming out of juvenile detention and beginning another four years in boarding school. I was hardly in a position to evaluate the legal or emotional consequences of changing my family name. The adults around us talked us into it, and I do not remember feeling that there was a genuine choice. The message was that this was a good idea and that we should agree. So we did.

My birth name was Paeshuys - the family name I had inherited from my father. In Flemish it could sound a little unusual, and as children we were sometimes teased or bullied because of it. That became one of the arguments that made the change easier to accept. A different surname seemed as though it might remove one more reason for other children to make fun of us. At that age, something as simple as escaping a name that attracted ridicule could feel important.

What I could not understand then was what the adoption meant on my father's side. My parents were divorced, and my father was already in serious decline because of his alcoholism. There was also outstanding alimony. As I remember it, pressure was put on him to consent to the adoption with the understanding that, if he signed, the outstanding alimony would no longer be pursued. Whatever the adults believed they were resolving, the result was that my father agreed to let another man legally adopt his children.

I cannot know what that moment was like for him. When I was a teenager I certainly did not have the maturity to imagine it from his position. I was dealing with my own confusion, my own institutions, my own struggle to get through each stage of adolescence. I knew that my father was drinking heavily and that his life was deteriorating, but I did not understand how vulnerable he had become or what losing his children's name might have meant to him.

My father died when I was fifteen, during my hotel-school years. He was only thirty-eight years old. The adoption and his death became connected in my mind only much later. I cannot say that one caused the other, and I do not want to turn a painful memory into a certainty that I cannot prove. But as an adult, and especially as a father myself, I have often wondered what that experience did to him. At times I have thought of it as one more blow in a life that was already collapsing, perhaps even the final emotional blow he had the strength to absorb.

That thought became much harder to live with once I had a son of my own. I began asking myself how I would feel if my son came to me and said that he wanted another man to adopt him and that he wanted to give up my family name. Even imagining it is painful. Today I can understand something that the adolescent version of me simply could not: a surname can be only a word on a document, but it can also carry belonging, lineage, identity and the feeling that your children are still connected to you.

For years I carried a quiet sense that, by agreeing to the adoption, I had somehow turned my back on my father. Intellectually, I know I was a child. I was being guided by adults, and there were pressures and circumstances around the decision that I did not control. Emotionally, however, the story has never been that simple. The older I became, the more I understood the permanence of what had happened, and the more uncomfortable it became to look back at it.

The name Lambert stayed. It became my name, the name under which I built my adult life. Eventually it became my son's name as well. And now that I am a grandfather, it is the family name carried by his two children. A decision made when I was a teenager, in circumstances I barely understood, has travelled through generations.

That is perhaps the strangest part of it. My grandchildren carry the surname of the man who adopted me, while the name I was born with - Paeshuys, my father's name - ended with me on my branch of the family. When the papers were signed, I could not possibly have understood that consequence. I was thinking about school, about being teased, about surviving the life directly in front of me. I was not thinking about children who did not yet exist, let alone grandchildren.

Even my son does not know the full story. He knows me as Lambert because that is simply who I have always been to him. He has had no reason to imagine that there was another name before it, or that the change came out of such a complicated period in my childhood. In that sense, the adoption became one of those family stories that disappeared in plain sight. The evidence was there every time I wrote my name, but the story behind the name remained largely unspoken.

I do not tell this story because I want to assign simple villains and victims. Families under pressure make decisions for complicated reasons, and I was too young to know everything that happened between the adults. What I can describe is my experience: I felt pressured, I did not feel free to refuse, and I did not understand what I was agreeing to. Only much later did I begin to appreciate what the decision may have meant to my father and what it would continue to mean for me.

There is a particular cruelty in realizing the significance of a decision only after the person most affected by it is gone. I could never go back to my father and ask him what he felt when he signed those papers. I could never tell him that I had not understood. I could never explain that changing my name had not meant that I stopped being his son.

At fifteen, I was still trying to figure out where I belonged. I had already spent years feeling as though other people were deciding where I should live, what I should study and what kind of person I ought to become. The adoption became another part of that pattern. Even my name - one of the most basic markers of identity - became something decided in a process that I did not feel powerful enough to challenge.

I entered adulthood as Dirk Lambert, and that is the name I have carried ever since. But Paeshuys remains part of my story because it was my father's name, and once it was mine too. I cannot change what happened, and I cannot know how different things might have been if we had refused the adoption. What I can do now is finally acknowledge the weight of it, and acknowledge the boy who agreed without understanding how far that signature would travel.

PART THREE - BECOMING A SOLDIER

Discipline, command and the Cold War

Chapter 11: The Army

When I finished hotel school, there was no long period of freedom waiting for me. In Belgium, military service was still mandatory, and I had to go almost directly from one institution into another. Every young man was expected to serve for at least a year. After four years in Koksijde, the next uniform was already waiting.

The difference was that the army began by asking me a question I had rarely been asked before: what did I want to do? During the medical examination and interview, an officer asked what kind of military service interested me. I gave him two answers. I wanted to become an NCO, a non-commissioned officer, a sergeant, and I wanted to do something exciting. If possible, I wanted to become a commando.

They questioned me thoroughly about that choice. I was not an obviously athletic young man, and the route I was asking for was physically demanding. Still, they eventually gave me the opportunity to enter NCO training. I was sent to the military base at Turnhout in Belgium, where commissioned and non-commissioned officers were trained.

The basic NCO course lasted ninety days. Ninety days does not sound like very long when you say it quickly, but while I was living through it, it felt like half a year. The training was intensive from morning until night. There was running, obstacle-course work and drill. We learned weapons handling and how to dismantle and reassemble the weapons we were issued. We spent time on the shooting range. There was close-combat training and physical conditioning, but that was only one part of it.

We were also being trained to lead. There were classroom lessons, first aid, radio procedures, map reading, and nuclear, biological and chemical training. The subjects seemed endless. Every few days there appeared to be something else we were expected to understand and eventually demonstrate under pressure.

Strangely, I enjoyed it. That was a major difference from hotel school. The work was hard and the days could be exhausting, but I was interested. I was being challenged in ways that made sense to me. There was equipment to understand, procedures to master, problems to solve and clear standards to meet. For once, discipline did not only feel like something being imposed on me for no reason. It had a purpose.

At the end of the ninety days we had examinations. I passed, and I became a sergeant, an NCO. I remember the feeling of accomplishment when I earned those three stripes. After so many years of being the bad student, the boy who did not fit, the one who had finished hotel school without even receiving a diploma, I had entered a demanding military course and finished near the top of my class.

That mattered because our examination results determined the order in which we could choose our postings. The highest-scoring graduates got first choice from the available assignments, and I was one of the people near the top of that list.

A few of us had already decided what we thought would be the coolest possible job. We wanted to become RP, regimental police, riding the BMW motorcycles. That idea appealed to me immediately. As a child I had loved the television series CHiPs, with the California Highway Patrol officers on their motorcycles. The image had stayed somewhere in my head. Becoming a sergeant and riding a police motorcycle seemed almost perfect.

Then the commanding officer interrupted the selection process. There was a shortage of tank commanders near the East German border, he told us, and the army was counting on some of the stronger graduates to volunteer.

I was six foot five, which made me an unlikely candidate for a tank crew because the inside of an armored vehicle is an extremely confined place. Nevertheless, I volunteered. Whatever plan I had imagined involving a BMW motorcycle disappeared, and instead I was put on a train and sent east, toward the Belgian forces stationed in Germany.

My posting was at Arolsen, one of the Belgian bases farthest from Belgium and much closer to the East German border. This was 1984 and 1985, at the height of the Cold War, and Arolsen felt completely different from Turnhout. This was not a training school. It was an active combat unit, the First Cavalry, and there was a particular atmosphere around the place that is difficult to describe without making it sound more dramatic than it was.

Nobody was running around in panic. Everyday military life continued: meals, inspections, maintenance, exercises, conversations in the bar. But beneath all of that was pressure. There was a sense that what we were preparing for might actually happen. The border was not an abstract line on a classroom map. East Germany was nearby. The Cold War was the world we were living in, and there was always the possibility, however remote, that the orders one day might stop being part of an exercise.

I enjoyed the status of being an NCO. We had privileges that ordinary soldiers did not have. There was an NCO and officers' bar and restaurant, and the food was very good. I shared a large room with a colleague in the military-police quarters, which would eventually produce stories of its own. Compared with the tiny rooms and institutional dormitories of earlier years, it felt almost luxurious.

There was, however, no luxury when it came to physical training. The commander of the base believed passionately in PT. As I remember it, everybody had to run about five kilometres every day, regardless of rank or job. There were longer runs as well, around ten kilometres weekly and fifteen kilometres once a month. On top of that came marches, exercises and long periods in the field.

I was never a natural runner, so there was plenty of suffering involved. But the result was that I became extraordinarily fit. At six foot five I weighed only about eighty-three or eighty-four kilos, and I was in perhaps the best physical condition of my life. The young man who had not looked particularly athletic when he volunteered for NCO training had been transformed by constant movement and military routine.

My next task was to train as a tank commander. The vehicle I eventually commanded was a Spartan CVRT, a small, fast tracked reconnaissance vehicle. My crew consisted of seven men altogether: a driver, a turret gunner who also handled the radio, myself as vehicle commander, and four commandos carried in the back. Among those men were a sniper, an RPG man, a machine gunner and another man responsible for carrying ammunition for the machine gun.

The Spartan was tiny, especially for someone my size, but it was remarkably agile. We could drive it at speeds that felt completely unreasonable for a tracked armored vehicle, somewhere around 110 or 120 kilometres an hour on the highway as I remember it. It was designed for reconnaissance, and speed was part of what made it useful.

For me, the technology was irresistible. We had night-vision equipment on board: one unit for the driver and another that could be used by either the commander or the turret gunner. This was early-generation equipment and, to us at the time, it felt incredibly advanced and incredibly expensive. I remember being told that a single unit cost around fifteen thousand dollars. Whether or not I fully understood the value at that age, I understood that the army was trusting us with serious equipment.

That appealed directly to the part of me that had always loved machinery, mechanics and electronics. The boy who had once taken apart an electric typewriter was now being paid to understand and command an armored reconnaissance vehicle filled with radios, optics and military technology. For once I was surrounded by machines and expected to know how they worked.

And I had the time of my life. We spent enormous amounts of time in the field: driving, exercising, bivouacking, camping and playing war games. There was camaraderie, exhaustion, mud, machinery and the particular kind of humor that develops among young men who spend too much time together under difficult conditions. There were the boys, and there were the toys, and for a while that combination suited me perfectly.

But the seriousness was always there. Our exercises were not performed with the feeling that we were simply pretending. We trained for situations that everyone understood could become real. On shooting ranges we often used live ammunition. There was excitement in that, certainly, but there was fear as well. We were young, heavily trained, armed and stationed in a region where the possibility of conflict was part of the background to everyday life.

At one point our unit was given an intervention role. There had been terrorist attacks in Germany, including attacks connected with the Rote Armee Fraktion against American military targets, and American soldiers had been killed. Because our base was in the region, we could be called upon to assist if an American installation nearby came under threat or if an attack required additional military support.

For one period we were on twenty-four-hour readiness for an entire week. We slept in our uniforms. We took off our boots, but not much else. The expectation was that if the alarm sounded we had to be moving within minutes.

Several alarms came during that period. We would prepare, move out, and eventually be told that it was an exercise. After enough repetitions, part of you begins to expect the same explanation every time.

Then one night the alarm sounded again, and this time nobody told us it was a drill.

We were issued live ammunition. I remember handing ammunition to my men, 7.62 and 9 millimetre rounds, and feeling the entire mood change. An officer told us that this one was real. This was the real thing. And then he repeated an instruction that stayed in my head: 'Shoot to kill.'

There is a difference between hearing words like that during training and hearing them while you are carrying live ammunition and being sent out into the night. We were not deployed in our Spartans. We climbed onto the back of trucks as a commando intervention force and drove through the darkness toward an American base. We believed we might be moving toward an encounter with armed terrorists.

I remember the mixture of emotions more than anything else. There was fear, but there was excitement too. Every exercise, every shooting range, every procedure we had practised suddenly seemed to be narrowing toward this one moment. We were ready. At least we believed we were ready.

About three quarters of the way there, somewhere in the middle of the forest, the trucks stopped. Everyone was ordered to disembark. A commanding officer gathered us together and announced that it was, after all, another drill.

Then came the punchline only the military could invent: we had to walk back to the base.

I no longer remember the exact distance. It may have been around fifteen kilometres, perhaps more or less, but it took us the rest of the night. We walked back carrying our weapons and all the ammunition we had been issued. After believing we were being sent into a genuine terrorist intervention, our great operational climax was a long march through the darkness carrying a very heavy load.

That experience captured something about military life for me. The danger could feel completely real, and sometimes the absurdity was equally real. You learned to live with both.

What mattered to me most during those years, though, was not the tank, the weapons or even the possibility of action. It was discovering that I could lead people.

I believed I was born to be a leader, and being a sergeant felt natural to me. I was hard on my men. I demanded a lot from them. I expected discipline, effort and competence. But I also tried to be fair. I never believed leadership meant simply humiliating the people below you or proving that you had authority. If I expected something from my men, I believed there had to be a reason for it.

They respected me, and I respected them. At the time I could see that in the way the unit functioned, but I only understood how much it meant later.

Belgian mandatory service was one year, but I chose to extend mine and remained in the army for a second year. That meant soldiers who had served under me began completing their service and returning to civilian life while I was still at Arolsen.

Then letters started arriving.

Men who had already gone home took the time to write to me. They thanked me for having been their sergeant, for the way I had commanded them and for the way I had treated them. Those letters touched me more deeply than any stripe on my uniform could have done. Nobody had ordered them to write. There was nothing they could gain from me anymore. Their military service was finished. They simply wanted me to know that the time we had served together had meant something to them.

For much of my childhood I had been the boy adults struggled to manage. I had been sent away, institutionalized, judged as difficult, a terrible student, and eventually the only boy in a graduating class of hundreds who did not receive a diploma. Yet in the army, in one of the most disciplined environments I had ever entered, something unexpected happened: I did not collapse under responsibility. I grew into it.

The army trusted me with men, weapons, communications equipment and an armored vehicle. More importantly, the men under my command trusted me with themselves.

For the first time in my life, discipline was not simply a cage someone else had built around me. It had become something I could use. And leadership was no longer a fantasy about who I might become one day. I was already doing it.

PART FOUR - REINVENTING MYSELF

A broken relationship and a self-taught future in technology

PART FIVE - BEYOND BELGIUM

1989: submarines, humanitarian work and a road east

PART SIX - BANGKOK

1994: collapse, street survival and another beginning

Chapter 18: The Great Escape: One Way Ticket to Bangkok

By the end of 1993, my life in Belgium had narrowed to something I could no longer pretend was temporary. I was homeless. A friend had allowed me to sleep in a garage box, and an old couch had become my bed. It was the middle of winter, bitterly cold, and I remember lying there with the sense that whatever version of my life I had been trying to hold together had finally collapsed.

I had recently returned from the humanitarian convoy to Ukraine. The trip had lasted about a month, and it had given me a glimpse of another world, another direction, another way of being useful. But when I came back to Belgium, there was no heroic homecoming waiting for me. I returned to the same problems, the same instability and a life that seemed to be closing in rather than opening up.

So I began planning what I thought of as my great escape. I wanted out of Belgium, not for a holiday and not for a carefully planned overseas career. I wanted to leave in the most final way I could imagine at the time: a one-way ticket to Bangkok.

The problem was money. I had almost none. I borrowed what I could from friends and acquaintances, mostly from the handful of people who had not yet turned their backs on me. Piece by piece I managed to put enough together for the ticket. There was no safety net waiting in Thailand, no job, no apartment and no return booking. The entire plan was built around one idea: get on the airplane and do not come back.

Strangely, although I was homeless, I still owned a car. It was a Suzuki Vitara, a small Jeep that I was quite fond of and, compared with the rest of my circumstances, a surprisingly decent possession. On the day I was supposed to leave, I drove it to Brussels Airport and parked it in the long-term parking area. I locked the car, took one final look at it and threw the keys away underneath a row of other parked cars.

That gesture felt important. I was trying to remove the possibility of retreat. If I kept the keys in my pocket, some part of me might still believe I could walk back out of the terminal, get in the car and return to the life I was trying to escape. Throwing them away was my way of saying there was no going back.

Then I walked into the airport.

I was there roughly three hours before the flight. Under normal circumstances that should have been more than enough time. But I was not under normal circumstances. I was coming off crack cocaine and the withdrawal was hitting me hard. My body and mind were in chaos. I was exhausted, restless, unfocused and physically miserable. Time did not behave normally when I was in that state.

Somehow, despite arriving three hours early for the most important flight of my life, I missed it.

To this day, I cannot explain exactly how. I had one job: get on the airplane. I had built the entire escape around that single moment, and I still managed to fail at it. When I realized the flight had left without me, I was devastated. It was not merely the inconvenience of missing a plane. It felt as though I had failed at escaping the life that was destroying me.

I turned around and headed back toward the parking lot, intending to get into my car and figure out what to do next. Then I remembered what I had done with the keys.

I had thrown them away.

Somewhere beneath one of hundreds of cars in the airport parking area were the keys to the only thing I still owned that could move me anywhere. I had no idea exactly where I had tossed them. So there I was, already in withdrawal, emotionally wrecked from missing the flight, crawling around a Brussels Airport parking lot on my hands and knees looking underneath cars one by one.

It took about an hour. I searched row after row, trying to reconstruct where I had parked and which cars had been beside mine. Eventually, almost unbelievably, I found the keys. I unlocked the Vitara and drove away from the airport.

There would not be another flight the next morning. In those days the connections were not as frequent as they are now, and the next departure was still two or three days away. I checked into a cheap Formula One hotel near the airport, one of those bare-bones places designed for people who needed a bed and very little else.

By then the crack withdrawal had become extremely difficult. I did what addicts often do when the immediate goal is not recovery but simply making the next hour tolerable: I called my dealer. I had more crack delivered to the hotel so I could stop the withdrawal long enough to function. It was not a proud decision, and it was certainly not a solution. It was simply where I was at that moment. I was trying to get out of Belgium while still carrying the very thing that was helping destroy my life.

A few days later I went back to the airport. This time I made the flight.

The journey to Bangkok took about twelve hours. I do not remember the flight itself as clearly as I remember what happened when the aircraft door opened at the other end. Bangkok in January 1994 was a very different airport experience from today. There was no enclosed passenger bridge carrying us directly into an air-conditioned terminal. A mobile staircase was rolled up to the aircraft and we stepped straight out into the open air.

The first thing that hit me was the heat. Belgium had been freezing; Bangkok felt close to forty degrees Celsius. The second was the humidity, thick and immediate, wrapping around me before I had even reached the bottom of the stairs. The third was the smell of jet fuel, powerful and unmistakable on the hot airport tarmac.

Heat. Humidity. Jet fuel.

Those three sensations arrived at once, and something inside me broke open. I became overwhelmed with emotion. I remember tears coming, or being very close to tears, standing there after a twelve-hour flight with almost nothing certain ahead of me. It makes little logical sense. I had no real home in Thailand, no job, almost no money and very little understanding of what was about to happen to me.

And yet the feeling was unmistakable.

I had come home.

I cannot explain that moment in a more rational way because rationality was not what I experienced. I had spent much of childhood feeling as though I did not belong anywhere, as though the mothership had left without me. I had moved through institutions, relationships, addiction, homelessness and constant reinvention. Then I stepped onto an airport tarmac on the other side of the world and, for reasons I could not have explained, felt a sense of recognition.

Thailand was not going to rescue me. The months ahead would be difficult, unstable and at times dangerous. I would run out of money, overstay my visa and come close to living completely on the streets. But in that first moment, none of that existed yet. There was only the heat and the strange certainty that I had finally arrived somewhere that mattered.

I did have one thread connecting me to Bangkok. During the humanitarian convoy to Ukraine, I had unexpectedly met a priest I remembered from my years at the Catholic boarding school in Essen. He was the same priest who had been kind to me when I was a boy, the man with the tractor and the old car who had given me a few decent memories inside an otherwise numb period of my childhood. Before we parted, he gave me the name of another priest in Bangkok connected with the Redeemer Church.

It was not much of a plan, but it was more than nothing. I now had the name of one person connected to one place in a city of millions.

After arriving, one of my first priorities was to find out where the church was. At the same time I needed somewhere to sleep. With very little money left, I searched for the cheapest accommodation I could find and ended up at the Crown Hotel in the Sukhumvit area.

At first, I did not understand what kind of hotel it really was. I simply knew it was cheap and that I could negotiate a monthly rate. Only later did I realize that it was essentially a short-time hotel, the sort of place where men brought prostitutes. The rooms were old, run down and moldy, the air-conditioning sounded as if it might shake itself apart, and there was even a mirror fixed to the ceiling above the bed.

It was hardly the beginning of a glamorous new life in Asia. But it was a room, I could afford it for the moment, and I was in Bangkok.

The great escape had not gone according to plan. I had missed the first flight, crawled underneath cars looking for keys I had deliberately thrown away, returned to crack cocaine just to make it through withdrawal, and arrived in Thailand with almost no idea what would happen next. Nothing about it looked sensible from the outside.

But I had made it.

For the first time in a very long time, the road in front of me felt more important than the one behind me.

Chapter 21: The Hustler

I arrived in Bangkok in January 1994 with a one-way ticket, a limited plan and about five hundred US dollars to my name. Five hundred dollars sounded like enough when I was still thinking in European terms. In Bangkok, without work, without a safety net and with no real idea how long I intended to stay, it disappeared frighteningly quickly. I checked into a cheap hotel in the Sukhumvit area and tried to get my feet on the ground. Within a short time, the question was no longer what I was going to do with my new life in Thailand. The question was how I was going to make it through the next day.

The hotel was the kind of place nobody would describe as charming unless they had a very dark sense of humour. It was an old short-time hotel, built sometime in the 1960s, the sort of place where men brought prostitutes for an hour or two. I managed to negotiate a monthly rate because I needed somewhere I could remain without paying tourist prices. The rooms were small, badly ventilated and run down. There was either no real window or only a tiny one, the walls and corners carried the dampness and mould of a building that had seen better decades, and the air conditioner sounded as if a small aircraft were trying to take off inside the room. On some nights I had to choose between the heat and the noise. If I wanted to sleep, I sometimes switched it off.

There was one detail in the room that summed the place up perfectly: a mirror fixed to the ceiling above the bed. It was not subtle. Everything about the hotel told you what kind of business it usually did. To me, however, it was simply home because I could still remain there. I had run out of money and was building up a bill I could not pay, but the hotel had its own reason for keeping me around. If they threw me out, they might never see the money I owed them. At some point they asked for my passport, telling me they needed it for immigration registration. I handed it over without thinking much about it. Then I never got it back. Strangely, I did not experience that moment as some dramatic imprisonment. I was too focused on surviving to think several moves ahead. The passport problem would become important later. At the time it was just one more loose thread in a life that had almost completely come apart.

My way into the tailor-shop world came through a man I met on the street, a local figure who effectively controlled that stretch of Sukhumvit. I thought of him as the local mafia boss. His English was good, we got along well, and over time he became something like a friend. That relationship mattered because street work in Bangkok had territories. There may have been plenty of other hustlers in the area, but he gave me my own strip near Nana Plaza, right in the heart of Sukhumvit. Within that patch I did not have to fight for tourists or worry much about competition. I also never had trouble with the police. Somehow, in the chaos of those months, I had found a tiny piece of Bangkok that was mine to work.

The job itself was brutally simple. I stood on the street and stopped tourists, trying to persuade them to walk into an Indian tailor shop. Every person I delivered through the door earned me one hundred baht. At the time that was roughly four US dollars. One hundred baht could keep me alive for a day. A simple meal cost around twenty baht, so three meals and three Cokes came to just under what I had earned from a single successful customer. My economy had become wonderfully primitive: one tourist meant food. Two meant breathing room. Nothing meant I had a problem.

The tailor understood that appearance mattered, so they gave me a suit to wear. That was almost absurd when I think about it now. Beneath the suit was a man with almost no money, no control over his passport, an unpaid hotel bill and an expired visa creeping closer in the background. But on the street I looked respectable. I looked as though I belonged to the city. I had to. My survival depended on strangers trusting me long enough to follow me into a shop.

I learned quickly that you could not approach people mechanically. You had to create a connection in seconds. One of my standard openings was simply, 'Where are you from?' If someone said Germany, I would ask which city. If they said Munich, I had an answer ready: 'Oh, my sister went to university in Munich.' Suddenly there was familiarity. We were no longer two strangers on a Bangkok pavement. There was a story between us, however improvised, and from there I could start talking about the tailor and suggest that they come inside just to have a look. I became inventive because I had to. The shy boy who had once struggled to speak to people was now stopping complete strangers in one of the busiest parts of Bangkok because eating dinner depended on it.

Once a tourist stepped into the shop, my part was largely done. The salesmen inside took over, and they were very good at what they did. People might enter believing they were only going to look and leave with an order for shirts or suits. What made it easier for me psychologically was that the tailor actually produced good work. I was not sending people into some obvious scam. The garments were high quality, customers were generally happy, and I never found myself being hunted down by angry tourists who felt cheated. Quite the opposite: many thanked me for introducing them to the shop. They often had no idea that the friendly European who had struck up a conversation on Sukhumvit was being paid simply to get them through the door.

I did not feel ashamed of what I was doing. There was no energy available for shame. I was living from hour to hour and day to day, and every evening I returned to that sleazy hotel simply relieved that I had made it through another twenty-four hours. My greatest fear was not the room, the mould, the noisy air conditioner, the unpaid bill or even the fact that my visa situation was getting worse. My greatest fear was having to go back to Belgium. Bangkok could be precarious, humiliating and uncertain, but as long as I was still there, I felt that things were at least half all right. Going back would have felt like defeat.

Every day I also went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Soi Ruamrudee. Those meetings served more than one purpose for me. I was trying to stay connected to recovery, but I was also trying to build a bridge into the expatriate community. I met foreigners who actually lived in Bangkok, people who had jobs, apartments, routines and networks. They represented the version of Thailand I wanted to reach. I did not want to hustle tourists forever. I wanted a foothold.

That foothold eventually came through a Canadian woman I met through the AA meetings. After about three months, she became my girlfriend, and through her I found the connection that led to my first real job in Bangkok. I did not know it while I was standing on Sukhumvit asking strangers where they came from, but I was already moving toward the next chapter. The street hustle was keeping me alive long enough for something else to become possible.

For those months, survival could be measured in one-hundred-baht increments. Get somebody through the tailor-shop door, eat that day, return to the hotel, sleep if the air conditioner allowed it, and start again in the morning. It was not a career and it was not a plan. It was a way of refusing to go home before Bangkok had given me a chance. The hustle kept me alive. The people I was meeting after hours were about to give me a way out.

Chapter 23: The Job That Saved Me

By then, survival in Bangkok had become a routine of its own. During the day I worked the streets around Sukhumvit, bringing tourists into tailor shops and earning enough commission to eat and keep myself going. It was not a life I had imagined for myself, and it certainly was not a life with any security, but I had learned how to survive from one day to the next.

There was one thing, however, that I did every single day that had nothing to do with hustling. Seven days a week I attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at Redeemer Church in Soi Ruamrudee, close to Sukhumvit. Those meetings became one of the few stable points in a life that otherwise had very little structure. I went because I needed them, but I also went because they connected me with another Bangkok. Until then, most of my life in the city had taken place at street level. I knew the hustlers, the tailors, the cheap hotels and the people who were trying to survive from one day to the next. At the AA meetings I began meeting expatriates who had jobs, apartments, careers and something resembling normal lives. They had problems of their own, obviously, or they would not have been sitting in an AA meeting, but they were functioning in a world that still seemed very far away from mine.

Redeemer Church was also sheltering several Iraqi refugees who had escaped the aftermath of the first Gulf War. I became friendly with some of them. They were living without proper papers and trying to remain out of sight, but what stayed with me were the stories they told. Some had lost wives or other family members. They had lived through violence and experiences that were difficult for me even to imagine. I was struggling badly at the time, and I do not want to minimize what those months in Bangkok were like for me, but listening to those men gave me perspective. Whenever I began feeling that my own situation was impossible, I was confronted with people whose lives had been torn apart in ways far beyond anything I had experienced. It did not make my own problems disappear, but it reminded me that there is almost always somebody carrying a burden you know nothing about.

The AA meetings also became my informal way into the expatriate community, although I would never have called it networking at the time. I simply kept showing up. Every day I met people, talked and listened, and slowly I became connected to people who lived in Bangkok rather than merely passing through it.

That was how I met Rebecca. She was Canadian, and we initially became friends. Before long the friendship became a relationship. Rebecca had what, from my position at the time, looked like an astonishingly normal life. She had a stable job, a decent apartment and the kind of routine I had almost forgotten existed. She worked as a production editor for a jewelry magazine, and eventually I moved into her apartment. I was, in a sense, piggybacking on the stability she had already built. I could not pretend otherwise. For the first time in months I had somewhere comfortable to sleep and a place that actually felt like a home rather than somewhere I was temporarily being allowed to remain.

Rebecca also lent me enough money to settle the outstanding bill at the hotel. That removed one of the weights that had been hanging over me since my arrival. My immigration situation was still another matter. My visa had long since expired, and technically I was living in Thailand illegally. I knew that sooner or later I would have to deal with it, but at that stage I still had no idea how.

After a couple of months, Rebecca told me that she had to return to Canada because of a family matter. She never explained very much about what was happening, and I did not push her. What mattered for my immediate future was the question she asked next: would I be interested in taking over her job?

It was one of those moments when a piece of your past, something you almost forgot had any value, suddenly becomes exactly what you need. Before my life had unraveled in Belgium, I had developed extensive computer skills. I had taught myself software, worked with computers professionally and, for a period, even taught PageMaker at an evening school. PageMaker was one of the leading desktop-publishing programs at the time, and I knew it extremely well. I understood page layout, graphics and the technical side of producing a publication on a computer. The irony was that I knew absolutely nothing about jewelry and had no particular desire to learn, but fortunately they did not need a jeweler. They needed somebody who could produce the magazine.

Rebecca arranged the introduction, and somehow the street hustler from Sukhumvit suddenly found himself working for Manager Media Corporation, one of the largest publishing companies in Thailand. It was an enormous organization with newspapers, weekly publications, monthly magazines and thousands of employees. To me it felt like entering a completely different universe.

I started in the Asian Jewelry magazine department, doing the graphic layout for a monthly tabloid-sized publication. I had almost no interest in the editorial subject matter. Diamonds, gemstones and jewelry meant very little to me, but the computer work was another story. That I understood, and I was good at it. In fact, I was so efficient that I could usually complete most of the monthly layout in only a few days. Once the editorial material and photographs were available, I could assemble the magazine quickly, and then I would spend much of the rest of the month sitting behind my desk with very little to do. After months of hustling tourists for one hundred baht at a time, boredom behind a desk was an extraordinary luxury.

More importantly, Manager Media gave me legitimacy. The company had considerable influence and strong connections within Thailand, and they were able to straighten out my immigration situation. My illegal overstay was resolved, and I was provided with the proper business visa and work permit. For the first time since arriving in Thailand, I no longer had to live with the constant knowledge that I was technically outside the law simply by being there.

Rebecca returned to Canada, and I could not afford to remain in her apartment, so I moved into a much more basic place of my own. It was nothing luxurious, but it was mine, and that mattered. Exactly six months after arriving in Bangkok, I had something that had seemed almost impossible when I stepped off the airplane: I had a job, an apartment, friends, legal status and a life.

My salary was about 25,000 baht a month, roughly the equivalent of €550 when expressed as a euro-equivalent using the exchange value of that period. It was not a fortune, but compared with earning one hundred baht at a time on the street, it felt like I had crossed into another world. I remember thinking that I had somehow crawled through the eye of a needle. I had arrived in Thailand with almost nothing, fallen through the cracks almost immediately, survived on the streets and in a hotel I could not afford, overstayed my visa, and somehow emerged six months later sitting behind a computer in a major publishing company. For a brief moment, I thought I had made it.

Then, three months later, Asian Jewelry collapsed. The magazine went bankrupt, and everybody was fired. The emotional drop was enormous. I had climbed from the street into a respectable job, and suddenly it looked as though I might be heading straight back down again.

There was, however, one unexpected piece of good news. Everyone who lost their job received three months of severance pay. On my final day I received my last month's salary plus three additional months: 100,000 baht in cash. At the exchange values of the period, that was roughly equivalent to about €2,200. The euro itself did not yet exist as circulating currency, of course, but that comparison gives some idea of what the amount represented. To me, it felt like an absolute fortune. I can still remember the feeling of having that much money physically in my pocket. After everything I had been through during those first months in Bangkok, one hundred thousand baht felt almost unreal. I had gone from calculating whether I could afford another meal to carrying more cash than I had ever held at one time.

But the money would eventually run out, and what I really needed was another job. Fortunately, during my time at Asian Jewelry I had occasionally dealt with the main computer department at Manager Media headquarters. The person running it was another Canadian, David Bicknell. We had met several times when I needed technical support for the magazine's computer network, so he already knew who I was. I called him, explained that Asian Jewelry had closed and told him about my computer background. By then I knew enough not to approach the conversation timidly. I had real qualifications. I had experience. I understood networks, software and desktop publishing, and I knew I could be useful.

Then David asked me how much I had been earning. I was actually making about 25,000 baht a month. I told him around 65,000. David sounded surprised and said that was a lot of money and that he would not be able to match it. I joked that perhaps my enormous salary was the reason Asian Jewelry had gone bankrupt. In the end, he offered me 50,000 baht a month, roughly twice what I had actually been earning. In euro-equivalent terms, that was around €1,100 a month at the historical exchange value. I accepted, but I added one condition: I wanted my salary reviewed after three months.

Looking back, I have to smile at the audacity of it. Nine months earlier I had arrived in Bangkok with five hundred dollars and no real plan beyond getting away from Belgium. A few months later I was hustling strangers on Sukhumvit for enough money to eat. Now I was negotiating the terms of a computer-management position inside one of Thailand's biggest publishing corporations, and somehow it worked.

The day Asian Jewelry closed became one of the best days I can remember from that period of my life. I walked out carrying 100,000 baht in cash and got into a taxi. Behind me was the magazine that had just gone bankrupt. In front of me was Manager Media headquarters, where I was about to become David Bicknell's right-hand man in the company's computer operation, helping manage the technology behind an organization with thousands of employees.

I sat in the taxi with that money in my pocket and thought about what had happened during the previous nine months. Nine months earlier I had arrived in Thailand frightened, broke and running from a life in Belgium that I could no longer tolerate. I had missed my first flight while coming off crack cocaine, finally made it onto the next one, landed in Bangkok with almost no money, ended up overstaying my visa, worked the streets for tailor shops, and depended on strangers and whatever opportunity came along. Now I was riding across Bangkok with enough cash to breathe for a while and a new job waiting for me at the other end.

The job at Asian Jewelry had lasted only three months, but it had done exactly what I needed it to do. It had pulled me out of survival mode, given me legal status, put me back behind a computer and reminded me that I still had abilities that had value. Most importantly, it had put me back into the world. There was no grand plan and no rescue mission. There was simply one opportunity leading to another, and this time I was ready enough to grab them. Nine months after arriving in Thailand, I was no longer asking myself how I was going to survive until tomorrow. For the first time, I could begin asking what I might do next.

PART SEVEN - THAILAND AND VIETNAM

1994-1999: responsibility, risk and a changing career

Chapter 25: 10,000 Employees

When I moved from Asian Jewelry into the computer department at Manager Media Corporation, I expected to find a large technical operation somewhere inside the company's headquarters. After all, this was an organization of roughly 10,000 people, with daily newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines, printing operations and more than a thousand computer nodes spread through the company. What I found instead was one of the strangest office setups I had ever seen.

The computer department was based in an ordinary house near one of Bangkok's universities. From the street there was nothing remarkable about it. It looked like any other house in the row, but inside it was effectively the headquarters of the company's IT operation. Very few people in Manager Media even knew where it was. We treated it as an undercover operation, and the project and the house had their own name: Atit Utai, which means 'the rising sun' in Thai. I loved the secrecy of it. There was something almost absurd about the fact that so much of the technology behind such a large publishing empire was being controlled from an anonymous house that most of the company could not have found on a map.

There were only three of us working there. David Bicknell, the Canadian who headed the operation, was the boss. Then there was Ponsak, a Thai colleague whom I liked very much, and me. Between the three of us we were responsible for more than a thousand computer nodes and the servers and technology attached to them across a company of around 10,000 employees. Looking back, it is difficult to imagine such a small team carrying that kind of responsibility, but computer departments were very different then. The systems were smaller and less layered than they are today, yet when something stopped working there were very few people to call. Usually, we were the people being called.

Manager Media was a publishing company, which meant downtime was not simply inconvenient. A failed server, a network problem, a broken cable or a printer that would not cooperate could delay a newspaper or magazine that had to go to press at a specific time. Deadlines were absolute. If a publication was supposed to print that night, telling somebody that the computer system would probably be working again tomorrow was not an acceptable answer. The pressure could be enormous, and I remember many nights working straight through, sometimes with David on the telephone while I tried to identify whether we were dealing with a software failure, a network problem, cabling, a laser printer or some other piece of technology that had decided to stop functioning at exactly the wrong moment.

My role was essentially that of a troubleshooter. Whenever a problem required somebody physically on site, I was sent. In another frame of mind I might have thought of myself as the department's gopher, but that was not how I experienced it at all. I thought I had the coolest job in the world. I was young, technically confident, constantly moving and trusted to solve problems that mattered. If something failed somewhere in Thailand or elsewhere in the region, I could suddenly find myself on the way to an airport with instructions to get there and fix it.

The company made that travel extraordinarily easy. I had a special Thai Airways card that, at the time, allowed me to walk up to a Thai Airways counter without a normal advance booking and be put on the next available flight I needed for work. It belonged to a very different era of air travel, long before the security world that followed September 11. I also had a company credit card for expenses, so when a problem appeared there was very little bureaucracy between receiving the call and getting on the road. On some occasions I was even taken to or from the airport with a police escort. I felt enormously important, perhaps more important than I really was, but at that point in my life the feeling was intoxicating. Not long before, I had been hustling tourists on Sukhumvit for enough money to eat. Now people were waiting for me to arrive because a system they depended on was down.

During that first year I made a rough count and came to something like fifty-five flights. I was constantly moving around Thailand and also traveling through the region, including Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam. Sometimes Ponsak came with me when a job was too large for one person. At other times we would be working in different places at the same time, each dealing with a separate emergency. I loved working with him. There was a camaraderie in knowing that the three of us were holding together an operation that was far larger than our little office suggested.

For me, the work combined almost everything I had always been drawn to: computers, electronics, problem solving, pressure, movement and the feeling that I had been given real responsibility. As a child I had wanted to understand how machines worked. Now I was being paid very well to understand systems, take them apart mentally and work out why they had stopped doing what they were supposed to do. I was treated with respect, I was trusted with expensive equipment and access, and every successful repair reinforced the feeling that I had finally found somewhere my particular kind of mind was useful.

The problem was that I loved it too much. I was so enthusiastic, so gung-ho about the next problem and the next trip, that I paid almost no attention to rest. There was always another flight, another deadline, another system that needed attention. Because the company paid for the travel and because I enjoyed the work, I did not experience the pace as a burden in the beginning. I experienced it as adventure. I did not understand that excitement does not cancel exhaustion. You can love what you are doing and still destroy yourself doing it.

I was burning the candle at both ends and telling myself that the light was proof that everything was going well. I had spent so much of my earlier life desperate to find a place where I belonged that, once I found work that made me feel capable and important, I did not know how to step away from it. Rest and recreation seemed unnecessary when I was eager for the next assignment. I kept going, flying, troubleshooting and working through nights, convinced that because I enjoyed the job I could somehow ignore what my body and mind were telling me.

For roughly a year, it worked. Then it didn't. By the end of that period I was physically and mentally exhausted, although I had been too busy to recognize how far I had pushed myself. The breakdown, when it finally came, was total. That belongs to the next chapter. What I remember about the year before it is something very different: an anonymous house called Atit Utai, three people looking after the technology of a company of 10,000, a Thai Airways card in my wallet, airports becoming almost as familiar as offices, and the absolute conviction that I had somehow landed the best job in the world.

Chapter 26: Five-Hour Coma

By the end of my first year with Manager Media Corporation, the company was beginning to expand beyond publishing. One of its new ventures was a five-star hotel being built in Dali, in China's Yunnan Province, a spectacularly scenic part of the country. The hotel was still under construction, and I was sent there to inspect and advise on several of the technical systems: CCTV and security, the computer network, and the fire-detection system. It was supposed to be a relatively straightforward assignment of about a week. In reality, my part of the work took only two days. Getting there, and getting back, became the real story.

I flew into Kunming and from there had to travel overland to Dali. The drive took roughly twelve hours through the mountains in an old Chinese army jeep. It remains one of the most frightening car journeys of my life. The driver seemed completely comfortable with the roads and drove at a speed that terrified me. At one point we passed the wreckage of a bus that had gone off a cliff into a ravine below. It was still burning and looked as though the accident had only just happened. I did not know whether people were still inside, and I did not want to know. For much of the rest of that journey I prayed to everything I could think of, convinced that every bend might be the one where we followed the same path over the edge.

When we finally reached the site, there was almost nothing there apart from the unfinished hotel and a small village nearby. There was no proper accommodation, so we stayed in one of the villagers' houses. It was the middle of winter, snow was falling, and I had not brought anything close to adequate winter clothing. The cold got into everything. The room where I slept had a tiny electric heater, but it was almost useless. You could feel some warmth if you held your hand perhaps twenty centimetres in front of it, but beyond that it made almost no difference. At one point it managed to singe part of the bedcover without noticeably warming the room. In the morning I could see my breath in the bedroom, and the blankets were damp and heavy with humidity.

The food did little to improve matters. My overwhelming memory is porridge: porridge for breakfast, porridge for lunch and porridge for dinner. Perhaps there were other things occasionally, but what remained in my mind was the endless sameness of it and the feeling that I was getting weaker by the day. My actual work was finished after about two days. Under normal circumstances I would simply have returned to Bangkok, but there was no easy way out. We had to wait for the vehicle that would eventually come back to collect us for the long drive to Kunming, so I remained there in the cold while becoming progressively more ill.

Eventually I developed what I believed was pneumonia. I had a fever, I was exhausted and I could feel that my body was no longer coping very well. The combination of illness, cold, poor sleep and the accumulated stress of the previous year was catching up with me. I had spent months pushing myself because I loved the work so much, constantly traveling, solving problems and treating exhaustion as though it were simply another technical issue that could be ignored.

There was one extraordinary interruption to the misery of that trip. When the weekend came and we had a day free, we went horseback riding in the mountains. The scenery was breathtaking. We rode through snow and fog with local guides, climbing higher into a landscape that looked as though it belonged in an adventure film rather than in my actual life. I remember some of the guides running alongside the horses, and one of them was barefoot in the snow. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. There I was wearing everything I had and still freezing, while he moved through the snow as though it were perfectly normal. For all the discomfort of that assignment, that day remains one of the most beautiful and surreal experiences I can remember: horses, mist, snow and mountains stretching away around us.

By the time I returned to Bangkok, however, I was completely run down. I was sick, severely stressed and physically exhausted. At the time I was staying in a hotel on Sukhumvit with my girlfriend Dara, who would later become the mother of my son. I felt miserable and wanted something that I thought might help me get over the illness and exhaustion. I still had connections with people from my earlier life around Sukhumvit, including the man I had known from the tailor-shop days, so I called him. Someone came to the hotel with a small plastic bottle containing a substance that was referred to as China White.

I am deliberately not going into detail about exactly what it was or how it was used. What matters is what happened next. I took a small amount and went to bed. According to Dara, almost immediately something went terribly wrong. My heart stopped, or at least that was how the emergency was later described to me. She called the front desk, the hotel called an ambulance, and by the time the emergency medical team reached the room I was unconscious and had turned blue.

I was rushed to hospital and placed on life support. For approximately five hours I remained in a coma. I learned later that my condition had been so severe that the emergency team believed they had lost me. The two EMTs who had brought me to the hospital actually came back the following day because, as they told me, they could not believe I had survived. Hearing that gave me some idea of just how close I had come to not waking up at all.

When I did wake up, I had tubes everywhere and was still connected to a respirator. At first I had almost no understanding of where I was or what had happened. My chest was black, blue and purple from the resuscitation attempts. The medical team had performed forceful chest compressions to keep me alive, and several of my ribs were badly bruised or strained. The pain was extraordinary, but at that moment pain was also evidence that I was still there.

Then a female doctor came to see me. She told me that they had detected a substance in my blood and that she was required to call the police. In Thailand that could have created an entirely new nightmare. I could barely speak, but somehow I managed to tell her to take my wallet. She opened it and found my identification card from Manager Media Corporation.

I still remember the change in her expression when she saw it. Manager Media was not an obscure company. It was one of the largest and most influential media organizations in Thailand, with powerful connections. She looked at the card, looked back at me and, in effect, told me not to worry about it. The police were never called. That little company ID card, sitting in my wallet while I was unconscious, may have saved me from an entirely different kind of disaster.

Lying in that hospital bed, however, the full meaning of what had happened had not yet reached me. My body had stopped, other people had fought to restart it, and the emergency team had not expected me to survive. Yet there I was the following day, staring at the bruises across my chest and trying to understand why I was still alive.

Only later did I understand how completely exhausted I had become before the trip to China. I had spent a year telling myself that I had the best job in the world, and in many ways I did. I loved the responsibility, the travel, the technology, the pressure and the feeling that people depended on me. I had gone from hustling tourists on Sukhumvit to being flown around the region to solve problems for a corporation with thousands of employees. But I had been burning the candle at both ends and mistaking enthusiasm for unlimited energy. I treated my body as though it were another machine, something that could keep running indefinitely as long as I forced it hard enough.

Dali had left me sick and depleted, but the months before it had already left me physically and emotionally exhausted. What happened in that Bangkok hotel room did not appear out of nowhere. It came at the end of a year in which I had ignored almost every warning sign my body was giving me. I had survived poverty, addiction, homelessness and the chaos of my first months in Bangkok, and then, just when my life finally looked successful from the outside, I nearly died in a hotel room. The strange thing was that I had spent so much of my life fighting to survive. This time, survival happened while I was unconscious.

This is the end of the sample chapters. The Long Way Home will be available soon.