At the height of Savage Garden's success, Darren Hayes was in the darkest place of his life.

INTERIOR: Psychiatrist's office, San Francisco, 1999.

A young man in his mid-twenties, dyed black hair, trim, dressed in a navy Bonds T-shirt and Levi's 501s paired with colourful Reeboks, sits in a wicker-backed chair. Opposite him, an older man in his mid-fifties, long wavy grey hair, linen shirt, grills the young man about his childhood…

I can't believe this is happening to me. I'm not crazy. I'm not one of those people who complain about their 'terrible childhoods'. Sure, I had it rough. But I survived. No, I fucking thrived. I'm a popstar. I'm rich. I'm successful. I own my own home, I paid the mortgage off on my siblings' homes and my mother and father's house. I probably won't ever have to work again if I don't want to. In three months' time I'll release the second Savage Garden album – that's the name of my band with Daniel Jones – and it's destined to be another massive hit. Our first album sold ten million copies and had a US Billboard number one single, 'Truly Madly Deeply', that became a hit all around the world. This new album, I've been assured by all the arse kissers at Columbia Records, will do exactly the same thing. It too has a future number one single on it, 'I Knew I Loved You'.

Life is great.

Life is perfect.

I'm just a little bit suicidal.

Okay, so life is not entirely perfect. Maybe there are a few things that could be better.

I've been sleeping my days away so much that Leonie, my assistant, has been checking every morning to see if I'm alive. Yeah, that's not great. I've had some, I guess you'd call them, dark moments. It's complicated.

Watch: Mental Health. Post contiues after video…

I recently came out (God I hate that phrase) to friends and family and the record label, as gay, and I thought that was going to be liberating and put an end to all of this suffering I've been experiencing but actually I've just experienced nothing but non-stop heartbreak ever since.

I guess I always knew there was something different about me but then what does knowing really mean? I was five years old when I kissed Noah, the boy who lived around the corner. The shame of knowing I was different seemed to pre-exist all thought, all feeling. It was as though I knew there was something terrible, something rotten and disgusting about me from before I could even verbalise it. Perhaps it was the subtle way other people treated me, or the distance I felt from my father, or this instinct to hide the most gentle, fragile parts of myself from the world. Somewhere in my earliest moments I received messages that who I was, deep in my core, was intrinsically bad and should be hidden.

Hindsight has given me clues that explain where much of this shame developed. Children, as we all know, are born pure of heart. They do not judge. They do not censor themselves. They act out of pure instinct and gravitate towards joy and pleasure, love and the need for safety. A child doesn't decide to be attracted to a gender; in the same way a child doesn't choose to love ice cream. Everything is instinct. You're either drawn towards something or you aren't. As a very young child I remember being subtly redirected away from being attracted to boys. It started off with my language being corrected.

I might be watching a television show and say that an actor was 'cute' and a sibling would say, 'Boys can't say boys are cute!' I don't blame my siblings for doing this, it's how children behave, especially in a world where parents and caregivers naturally reinforce gender norms. As a result, children mimic this policing of behaviours.

I was once a pre-school teacher. Sitting here in this therapist's office, in my fancy San Francisco neighbourhood, it's hard to imagine that well before all this popstar bullshit, I was forced to get a 'real job' by my father. Not many people know this, but the perks of having a father who never believed in you is that his complete and utter lack of faith in my talent as a musician resulted in a pep talk where he threatened to throw me out of the house unless I got a university degree. He taunted me, saying 'You'll end up living in the gutter' if I pursued music. I eventually got a teaching degree and spent time working with young children in order to keep a roof above my head. While doing so I witnessed firsthand how children love rules, boundaries, consistency and the safety of a belief system that their peers have demonstrated for them. I can't tell you the amount of times I had to stifle laughter when an extremely concerned four year old would raise her hand and exclaim in an anxious, life-threatening tone that a fellow classmate was not following 'the rules'. Usually this meant the person next to her was not sitting on the mat during story time.

From my siblings, to my parents, to kids at school, I was constantly corrected and redirected away from my natural instincts so that I stayed within the lines of what was considered to be normal and acceptable; whether that was to prevent me playing with dolls, or to steer me away from spending more time with girls, to shut down any expression of an attraction to the same sex, or to stifle any hint of emotion more typically expected from the opposite gender.

There was also a real-life Grimms fairy tale in our family that had a profound effect on how I viewed homosexuality: the tragedy of Aunt Vivienne.

Extracted from Unlovable by Darren Hayes. Available now from bookstores, as an eBook and an audiobook (read by Darren).

Feature Image: @darrenhayes Instagram.