To start, I wish there were more definitive rules about hugging. There should be a single set of laws—universal policies, non-negotiable and strictly enforced. Immediate family: hugging is okay. Friends: hugs approved if you’ve known each other for at least a year. Friends of friends, work colleagues, distant relations or first introductions: hugging prohibited under any circumstances. If you don’t know a person, how do you know you want to share physical intimacy with them?

A friend isn’t just who they are to you, but who you are and who you feel you can be when you’re with them.

Your music, with all the trumpets and saxophones, is like children’s music for adults and that’s what I need. I don’t have my work shifts to go to anymore so I have more time for lying in bed listening to music. Mum thinks lying in bed listening to sad music is a bad thing, but she only really listens to music on the radio when she’s driving so she probably just hasn’t ever done it right. I think she’d feel a lot better if she just lay still and listened to some Joni Mitchell.

Everyone has their stuff, and people don’t seem to want to talk about theirs so why should I be the only one? And then sometimes I wonder if I should even have this diagnosis, because it makes it seem like ‘normal’ people are on one side of the room and ‘abnormal’ people are over the other, when really it’s more of a whole range of different brains than a binary thing. I’m rambling now but you know what I mean. A label is fine in the hands of the person wearing it, it’s when someone else takes it and uses it without understanding what it actually means I wonder if it’s really so good at all.