A man has a bump on his forehead, an elongated ellipse, a fish without fins. We’ve only just met, we’re getting to know each other over a pint. Slate-grey eyes under Welsh mountainy eyebrows, jaws set forward from his skull, with even square teeth. A twenty-first century Neanderthal man. I reach out and trace the shape, and ask him: “What’s this?” It is our first physical contact. He’s animated, intense, burning a clear grey fire as he speaks. He locks his gaze into mine. He used to bang his head against a wall as a child. Constantly. He didn’t know why. We go out for a meal, we warm each other up with a snog at the end of the evening. It’s a bank holiday the next day – let’s do something? OK. Let’s get out of the city for the afternoon. Agreed. Let’s talk tomorrow, I say. Promise? he asks. Of course, I say.

Next day, I ring him at lunchtime, ready to play. He tells me that because I hadn’t rung earlier, he changed his plans, and invited friends over to lunch. He’s chopping scallions as he speaks. My guts take a lurch downwards. This familiar country of mine has many different maps. I choose not to see him again, and cry off from a half-hearted raincheck. I do not wish to be his brick wall.

I’ve been listening to many people’s stories recently; stories of addiction. Each story is different, but each story has a similar flavour, when the blood is scraped off the walls: hard, dry, gritty concrete, the taste of defeat. Those who have developed addictive traits – and it takes one to know one – find many imaginative ways of engineering their lives to bring them back to face that cold certainty.

It’s a place that is known as “rock bottom” in drinker’s parlance – the mysteriously compelling time and place where they know, once again, that they have lost all that is dear to them. In that moment, which can often be transcendent, almost mystical, they catch a glimpse of themselves in the mud, feel their skull as it cracks yet again against the painfully solid mass. Sometimes, if they’re open to change, they can feel curiously alive to their capacity for choice, again, as they’re back at square one.

If they’re lucky, they’ll choose not to repeat the round trip, and find other ways around the wall; if not, they leap into showy energetic activity, back to seemingly constructive engagement with life, but with a treacherous bunjee-cord around their leg, just waiting for the moment when success is within their grasp, to trip them up and bring them hurtling back.

That bunjee-cord’s a bugger. It’s like a cosmic umbilical cord, an astronaut’s airhose. We choose not to cut it, or let it go, because we are creatures of habit, and fear being out on our own, away from the familiar. The greatest fear we have to face is the unknown. And we go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it.

If we have never really known success, we will wallow in failure. If we have never really known love, we’ll get comfy with despair. If we’ve never felt rich, we’ll become bosom buddies with poverty. Like sleepwalkers, as we set out on each new adventure from the bedrock, we’ll absent-mindedly check that the bunjee-cord is attached to our ankle, a security blanket against the dread of the new.

We won’t even register we’ve done it, except when it’s too late – only after we’re back, with fresh bruises, will we remember the subtly self-destructive choices we made, the needy vibes we transmitted, the instinctive impulse we surrendered to, to stay in apparent control, rather than to let go and trust. Far better that we destroy ourselves, rather than leave it to a stranger, or to fate. At least, that way, we get to choose our poison.

The gambler stays up all night before a crucial business meeting, taking drugs and having sex, and goes through a hundred cold sweats in his suit as he bluffs his way through, eyes dilated black, pores oozing sleaze, writing rubber cheques and chewing his cheeks raw as he smiles and nods and chatters away, the drug-fucked loser inviting rejection. He survives, the deal is done, in spite of himself. He dines out on the story for months, victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, swearing never to repeat the escapade – but somewhere inside he’s sad. He’ll find a new way to fail. He doesn’t believe he deserves to succeed.

The lover comes home, having just passed a job interview, and wants to celebrate with his partner, who has a cold and wants nothing more than to slob out in front of the TV. The lover wants to see a reflection of his joy, to know it’s real, wants affirmation that he’s special; but sees in the eyes of his partner only his own ordinariness.

So he makes an excuse and goes out cruising in a park, wanting the thrill of the hunt to extend his rarely-felt and hardly-believed experience of success; instead he meets with a gang of queerbashers who beat him to within an inch of his life. He comes home with a story of having been mugged on the main street, and although the truth is never revealed, from then on the relationship is a sham, his shame eclipsing what was once a shining source of warmth and support in his life.

The nurse borrows her father’s car, to visit some friends out of town. She doesn’t count the glasses of wine she has with her lunch; she drives back and does not see the van heading for her at a crossroads. The car is written off, and she escapes with a bruised knee and whiplash; her wails of apology in the hospital to her father cut into his heart, for he cannot see why she goes on about the car, when he’s so relieved she’s alive.

She does not really care whether she lives or not; her heart was broken when, as an eleven-year-old girl, she witnessed her beloved horse being put to death by her father. She’s been raging at him ever since; and everything she does is unconsciously motivated to cause him as much pain as possible, again and again. She is afraid to let her rage go, and let something else in.

We keep on smashing back into our brick walls. But we never read what’s written on them, engraved in an ancient tongue: there is nothing to fear but fear itself.