Writer at Large Neil Mackay says that the hate and violence on Elon Musk’s X site was having a profoundly negative effect on him. Now he’s quit, he’s never been happier

Many years ago, when I was 15, I went very badly off the rails. There was a lot of drinking. I got involved in petty crime, drugs, glue-sniffing. At the start, I thought I was rebellious and cool – because when you’re 15, you’re an idiot.

Years later, I realised that much of what was happening back then was down to the brutal, uninhibited breakdown of my parents’ marriage. They tore each other to pieces and with them the entire family. It was ugly, extremely ugly. Cruel, pointless, humiliating to watch. Much of their conflict centred around me. I became their battlefield, and their war had no limits, no honour. I wasn’t shielded or protected from one moment of their madness.

So I got the hell out of that house as much as I could. When you’re young, and life isn’t going well at home, all you need are the right – by which I mean "wrong" – friends and you’re halfway to ruin. I directed my sublimated anger at my parents towards the innocent world. I could very easily have ended up in borstal.

I remain proud that I stopped what I was doing not because of the intervention of some saintly teacher or cop or loving auntie, but my own conscience. I realised that the world I was living in – petty crime and glue-sniffing – was the antithesis of who I was and what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to travel and meet interesting people, learn........

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