Illustration by Jenny Richardson

What is it that you feel a lot of, every day?

For me it’s fear. I grew up with fear, fearing to be hurt, to be punished, to be abandoned. That was the fear of physical and mental pain. My other fear was that of starvation (hence my experiment with six days of no eating). I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough food. Some days there wasn’t enough, and I learned the terrible, sharp pangs of starvation (I wasn’t quite one year old when I had to have a blood trans...