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I jokingly refer to myself as an anti-social git, but the real reason for my self-imposed exile from social spaces is that I’m so frequently misunderstood that I find solitude safer. I suppose that’s why a decade of remote working suited me, even if it stunted career progression. If I can minimise my contact with other people, I decided, I am less likely to get interactions wrong.

Of course, that’s not exactly a fix to the problem; it’s just avoidance. A true fix will require me first to confront exactly what’s going awry in my social functioning, and then access coaching to overcome it. These the kind of interventions that a holistic approach to diagnosis might have tackled, nearly twenty years ago. As it is, I’m on my own. Hence the all-pervasive avoidance strategy that has characterised most of my interactions with others to date.