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,

Young people, women especially, are easy fodder for them to bully, especially when we are new to fame and success, and a bit puffed up with the novelty of it all, while still being naïve and easily bruised, quick to take offence and easy to bait.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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