The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.

Sending your child off to school for the first time in their life is terrifying.

I was accorded the opportunity to learn by failing - albeit at the cost of a few honourable teachers' sanity - and now I realise what a rare and incredible luxury that is.

As I was growing up, it was made clear that the fat me wasn't welcome, that a thin person was expected and awaited, and impatiently so.

Does everyone turn into a truculent thirteen-year-old when they go home, or is it just me?

If there's one thing I know, it's this - everybody thinks somebody else is having a better life.

Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.