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My interlocutor was a British African-Caribbean secondary school teacher from Luton, drinking wine with my sister-in-law’s sister in the kitchen of my lodgings.

I wasn’t a particularly willing participant in that near one-way conversation. I was only present to prepare my evening meal. But she had me cornered, so I had little choice but to respond.

She was a zealous evangelist, active in her church. Her role teaching in Luton made her an authority on the backwardness of Muslims. So this was an opportune moment to put me on the spot.

“Why make your life so difficult?”

I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. If it was a competition, my host’s friend would have been considered the victor, so forceful against my inarticulate and defensive rebuttals.

But twenty-four years on, I have a different take on the jeering questions they deployed to mock my then two-year-long profession of faith. For what others saw as difficulty, I now realise was a path to ease.

Sure, there were difficult times, which set me in conflict with my entire family. I could never minimise the magnitude of those. As a friend of my brother and sister-in-law, my inquisitor claimed to know all about this, and made much of it in her jest.

From her vantage point, I was an inexplicable aberration, selfishly turning my back on the most religious of Christian families, and on all the immense privilege I had been raised amidst. It made no sense at all.

But she could not see what I carried within. An as-yet undiagnosed condition which had impacted every aspect of my life since infancy, both cognitively and physically. I didn’t know at the time what the issue was, but I knew something was wrong.

How could I not? I was 23 but still looked and behaved like a teenager, arms devoid of muscles, and the only hair on my face a couple of whiskers on the end of my chin. Beyond all that, the perplexing inability to hold a meaningful conversation, reverting so often to silence instead.

In asking her question, she could not see that my life was already difficult. Not in any economic sense, of course: I was raised in the affluent suburbs, and went to private school and university. But difficult due to the psychosocial impacts of a condition that would only be diagnosed three years later.

That evening, a guest chose to embarrass me on two fronts. My not drinking alcohol and the manner in which it was imagined I would pursue marriage. How ironic, for all these years later I see both cases of supposed hardship as the greatest sources of ease.

As happenstance would have it, just months after that not very friendly conversation, I would be introduced to the woman who became my wife on the other side of the nearby park, just two miles away. By August, we’d be married. Three years after that, she’d support me through that devastating diagnosis.

As for my not drinking alcohol? A lifetime saving of over £60,000 to personal finances, compared to the £27 billion it’s estimated alcohol-related harm costs the UK annually. Societal costs being the likes of alcohol-impacted cancers, domestic violence, accidents, and crime.

In the very short term, the path I walk may seem like an immense hardship to others looking in on my life. It’s over the long term that you see that in fact it is a path of ease.

If I encountered that woman today, what would we say to one another? Would we compare notes on the lives we’ve lived in the nearly quarter of a century since? Where the hardship, where the ease? Less humble, I might just ask her question back to her.