The Loss
of Self

Why am I the way I am?

When I was four, the woman I called Mum turned out not to be my mother. She was my grandmother — the one who raised me, my rock, my whole world. The woman I’d thought was my sister was actually my mother, and one afternoon she sat beside me on the pavement and told me to stop calling my grandmother “Mum” and start calling her that instead. Not out of love. Her boyfriend wanted a child, and rather than carry one herself, she reached into the only safe world I had and pulled me out by the roots. Five years later she looked at a dark-haired, brown-eyed boy in the street and said, “Why don’t I have a brown-eyed boy with dark hair?” I was blonde and blue-eyed. In that second I built a monster that spent the next fifty years whispering the same thing: you were never what she wanted.

I’m gay, and I have never wanted to be. I dreamed of a wife’s eyes, of children, of being the father who breaks the cycle — and being gay in my generation meant burying that. So I did what I’d learned to do at four: I escaped. At sixteen I ran, and I never looked back — across nine countries, four languages, always moving.

And here’s the part people don’t expect — for a long time, it worked. I was a figure skater decorated by the Luxembourg monarchy, the first athlete from my country to sign with Holiday on Ice. I was beautiful, and beauty opened every door; whatever I touched turned to gold. I acted in a François Ozon film, I modelled, I built streetwear empires and a recruitment company. A Porsche across a bridge in Düsseldorf at twenty-eight with three hundred thousand in the bank. Millions passed through my hands. I was winning.

Then my grandmother got cancer, and within twenty-eight days my entire life detonated. She had been my resilience — the one thing holding thirty-nine years of buried trauma at bay — and when she died, all of it came back at once. While she lay dying, my family sent me away to “protect” my sister; I met a man in the street and mistook him for a gift from her. She slipped into a coma the hour I left, and died days later. Within eleven days I let that man — HIV positive — infect me on purpose, because I could not survive losing one more person I loved. Days after that, my own grandfather — the man I’d called Dad for thirty-nine years — looked at me across a garden table where my family was already carving up the inheritance, handed me a bill for the cost of raising me, and said: “No, you are not my child.” And while I sat at her deathbed, the man I’d trusted with my business emptied every account, told my clients I was a fraud, and vanished.

In twenty-eight days I lost my mother, my father, my family, my income, my business, my dog, and my health. That was the catalyst for seven years of pure self-destruction. I booked surgery to look like someone else, and within weeks I looked nothing like the person I’d been before she died. I burned through every euro I had on chemsex and gear, getting high and playing for twenty-four hours at a stretch just to make time pass. I shared my partner with the men who paid for him, then sold my own body in hotel rooms — me, monogamous, so private I could barely say the word. I was drugged by a man I loved. I held a large kitchen knife and did the actual maths on twenty years in jail. I came within one decision of ending it all. I handed my power to one beautiful, broken man after another, mistaking being needed for being loved — re-staging the first wound again and again, hoping for a different answer from a mother who would never give one.

And then I fought. And fought. And fought back.

This is the book about all of it — about how one sentence in childhood writes every disastrous choice you make for the next five decades, until the day you finally see the pattern and it loosens its grip. I wrote it the way I talk: fast, filthy where it needs to be, funny where it has no business being funny, and honest to the point of pain — about everyone, starting with me. I let no one off the hook, least of all myself.

But I won’t lie to you about the ending. This is not a typical happy one. I’m fifty-three now — older, wiser, but not healed, because I don’t believe you ever fully heal from scars cut that early. What I’ve done instead is accept them, and finally protect my inner child rather than run from him. The cost is real and I’m still paying it: no savings, no career left standing, still in a relationship with the man who has hurt me most, none of the security most people my age have built. Where others have a pension, I have a story. I’m starting over at fifty-three with almost nothing, fighting to make a living, and hoping — though I can’t be sure — that this book is the thing that finally buys me the peace I have never once had. I still have to say it plainly: I have failed at my life. But I will not give up until I have made up for the last seventeen years. I have finally understood that the power I gave away — to men whose job it never was to take care of me, to make up for the disaster my mother was — I now place into my career, and into myself.

If you read one thing of mine, read this.