I think a neurotic learns from their mistakes. A psychotic does not.

It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.

There is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into something better, something more beautiful.

Thank God the Internet didn't exist when I was 15, 16. I knew people were tearing me apart, but my God, if there had been a net and commenters and I would have been reading them - it was bad enough as it was. To grow up in the media eye, I'm glad it happened, but that was definitely not healthy being around adults all the time.

Your own love story? Your paramour may have had lovers before you. But no one has ever loved him the way you do. No one has ever heard music. Not the way you hear it. The songs are beautiful vampires, asleep in your iPod, coming alive at night, aglow. You can have them on your hours, yours to conduct. Music shapes us and we shape it.

I'm not crazy or dangerous, just a bit eccentric and lonely.

Cyndi Lauper was hilarious and generous, someone I'd loved from childhood who didn't disappoint.