I realise now that I don’t have to pretend or fake things or divide myself into multiple parts. I can, instead, remain whole. We should all be able to live and work on our own terms, with integrity and without shame. I haven’t always done it, but people do, and that’s what I’m after. That’s what I’m striving for.

It turns out I’m not a pop star, per se. That was part of a ripple effect of what I do, and perhaps it will be again. It was a stage along the way: an odd Alice-in-Wonderland, exciting, tricky, confusing chapter. It turns out I’m a songwriter. It turns out my job is to write about what I see and what I’ve learned and what I feel and what I know. I

I don’t want to be silent. Women have been silenced for millennia, and I’m not going to be part of that. I want to speak up, and if that means I sometimes get it wrong, then I should be able to correct myself, apologise, move on and still carry on speaking up. As a woman, I’m not meant to be an angel or a saint or a martyr or to have faultless

What a waste of headspace. What a waste of consciousness. What an insult to every person struggling with illness or poverty or homelessness; what a diss to the sunshine and the sky and the birdsong and to any number of small pleasures or preoccupations that could have more joyfully and usefully occupied space taken up with worry about body weight.

Writing songs is cathartic, but nothing compares to someone else responding to them. That feels like a relief. When I write, what I’m trying to do is make sense of something in my life; often it’s something that I’ve been unsuccessful at solving. So when people connect, it feels like they are saying, Yes, I understand, and no, you are not alone,

I was struggling with getting out from under the shadow of my childhood and feeling so invisible and meaningless for so many years.

Rejection was the haze in which I lived as a child.

She’s a big brain inside a funny little lady.

When women share their stories, loudly and clearly and honestly, things begin to change – for the better.