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December 01 2025
© Mat Amp © Mat Amp

How sharing his experiences has helped our writer recognise and work through events and trauma from his past. By Mat Amp

Over the past few years, I’ve talked and written a lot about the stuff that used to torment me. As a result it has become increasingly easy for me to share issues that spent years trapped inside my subconscious, fueling its nightmares with the sharp double-barrelled whiplash of shame and regret. 
But the process of writing about the difficult shit I have been through, as well as having an encouraging and unjudgmental forum to share it through, has helped me turn haunting issues into experience. It’s been transformative. 
Instead of continuing to be paralysed by the fear and shame that impacted my life in the wake of experiencing homelessness, I have confronted what has happened in my life by talking and writing about it. 
Because my parents died when I was young, being homeless was something that I dreaded. I always knew that there was no safety net for me. There was no family home to fall back on and the bank of mum and dad was effectively closed.

And of course, losing them inflicted a lot of trauma on me. A lot of trauma that, until recently, didn’t just remain untreated and unresolved but, to a large extent, unrecognised.

Looking back on things now, a bit of grief counselling would probably have helped, but this was the 1970s – a time when traditional communities had started to dissolve but progressive therapies had yet to develop.

And when I found myself orphaned at the age of 17, I was living in this country, somewhere I didn’t grow up or have a network of family and friends. Without a penny or a place to live, I was fortunate enough to connect to the squatting scene, which proved a massive safety net for me, as it was for so many people back then.

To the average Daily Mail/Sun/Telegraph/Express reader (basically everyone who didn’t either read the Guardian or the Socialist Worker)  squatting was tantamount to home invasion by hippies. Drip-fed by the voices of privatisation, many people came to view squatters with a twisted kind of envy. Free housing? How dare they?

To me, squatting was a coalition of creative types, abused kids and all sorts from all backgrounds, which, in a country divided hard along class lines, was what I’d call a successful social experiment.

This is what I loved about the UK at the time. The numerous DIY cultures during the late ‘80s and ‘90s, magnified by the mass downing of E’s, spawned a culture of connection that meant for a while it became cool to be kind.

I started to find an identity in that culture and I loved London because, as a mixed-race kid, I felt like I belonged.

There was so much about the place and that culture I loved but I got lost in getting high. We put on parties where everyone got high, I bought a house with the money I got from other people getting high, while some of those people would come to get high or buy stuff to take away in order to get high somewhere else.

Some of that drug use was straight-up fun but some of it was what we would now call self-medicating.

I would never have started healing from the traumatic experience of losing my parents if it wasn’t for the therapeutic embrace of drugs like LSD, Ketamin and ‘shrooms and of course the DMT. Even the mainstream world is starting to wake up to the efficacy of tripping our tits off as a means of treating depression and trauma.

But the thing about self-medicating and where it goes horribly wrong is addiction. That’s when the drugs you do to expand your mind like LSD, mushrooms, ketamin and DMT meet the narcotics like smack and crack.

Sometimes though, I think smack gets a bad ride. A fellow heroin addict once said to me “we don’t have a drug problem mate, what we have is a money problem.” And there is a lot of truth in that. People who use narcotics but still manage to successfully go about their lives, will often take great pleasure in telling us that they are a functioning addict, you know, like they are really clever. What they actually mean by this is that they have ready access to the poison of their choice. And so it was for me. Whilst I had plenty of money my heroin addiction wasn’t really a problem. In fact, in some way it was helping me to deal with a world that I often found difficult to navigate. I was a functioning addict, but when I lost everything I became a junky.

You know the old adage, what goes up must come down and so it was. When, after 25 years, I finally came down, I fell fast. And it was not in anybody’s description or definition a smooth or easy ride. Dude, it was proper bumpy as fuck.

At times, it has been hard to accept that I lost everything. Regret is a motherfucker, though, and if you can find a way of feeling different about the difficulties in your past and what those difficulties are costing you now, then grab it and hold on.

For me, I hold on to the storytelling. I love thinking about my problematic past openly and writing or talking about the way it makes me feel. I love it when people read what I’ve written and comment on it. The things I generally write about in this magazine and things that we are traditionally encouraged to hide from others because we are repeatedly told that they are not things to be proud of.

But I’m not showing off. I’m sharing them for a host of other reasons and anyway, I don’t think they are things to be ashamed of either.

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February – March 2026 : Progress

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