Nathan Filer

She's known sadness. That's what it is. I only just thought that as I wrote it. She's known sadness, and it has made her kind.

I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in your grief, one day that madness will stir in the chair, and it will say to him, 'You look pale.

HELLO, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfil. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, how hard you hope.

Any punishment is an insult to the crime

If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope.

This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.

Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn't want.

We are selfish, my illness and I. We think only of ourselves. We shape the world around us into messages, into secret whispers spoken only for us.

I don't want the world to keep turning without me on it.

I guess there's a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.I guess that's what turning eighteen means.Time to own it.

It's hard to know what to say sometimes, when someone does something so nice. It's hard to know where to look.

But that is what these people do - the Steves of this world - they all try and make something out of nothing. and they all do it for themselves.

Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow.

I do not have a split mind. I am not different people. I am myself, the same self I have always been, the one person I can never escape.

This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think will have MAD stamped across it.

Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.

Inside my head is a jigsaw made of trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms. It might take a while.

You only really know what a smile means when you own the face behind it. Everyone else just sees the smile they expect it to be.