When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.

Are you mine?” Yes. “Are you mine?” Yes. “Are you mine?” No. “No?” No. I loved being yours. But now I’m mine, which is all I ever was, in the end.

He was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.

I think that's such a beautiful sentiment. Love should only last as long as a very expensive and impractical bikini that looks stunning, but dissolves in the sea within days. So many pop songs tell of this terrible, tiresome love that they want to last forever. But that just makes me think of long-life milk, acrid and fake. Love should be like a movie trailer. Even if the film's a stinker, you get the best laughs and the biggest explosions in the space of two minutes.

A lot of the time in my recurring dreams, before I was diagnosed, iconic people would either be good or evil figures. I remember dreaming really basic stuff like trying to navigate the London underground, but then Paul Newman would be the only one who would direct me to the right trains. And I'm trying to remember who would direct me to the wrong ones.

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.

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