Even when unthinkable things were happening to me, my first instinct was to work. Am I addicted?

It was only years later, when I heard the word workaholic being used seriously for the first time, that I wondered whether I had a problem

Have you ever heard a word that jolts you to attention? That word, for me, was “workaholism” – and when I heard it through my headphones earlier this year, listening to an audiobook on the tube, I felt a pang of something between recognition and panic. It transported me back to the worst time in my life.

In May 2016, when I was nearly five months pregnant, I travelled to rural Norway to make a short documentary for the Guardian. The Norwegian government was making asylum seekers – from mostly Muslim countries – take cultural education classes about women’s rights. I’d been invited to a class in Moi, a town by a lake framed with pine trees, 100km south of Stavanger.