AUGUST 1980: My mother takes her own life. I no longer know what she looked like but I still know what smelled like when I found her. I will forget all of it for a long time.

AUGUST 1988: A girl tells me I don't have proper parents. When I ask what she means by this, my mother answers: "What if that were true?" Nothing is as it seems.

MAY 1996: I am pregnant while sitting my school leavers exams and know that the little creature inside me and I will be a gift to each other.

NOVEMBER 1996: The baby is very ill and I turn into a lioness. I sleep for nights on end on chairs pushed together in hospital corridors.

AUGUST 1999: He watches me with kind, smiling eyes over breakfast in a café on a sunny Sunday and shows me how to love.

AUGUST 2001: I start writing short texts. This turns into a regular writing frenzy. In two weeks I have seventy-five of them in front of me. He and I make an artist's book out of them.

JULY 2003: Our daughter is born, we marry in secret and move in together.

JANUARY 2009: He has fallen in love with someone else and I'm supposed to stay. Once again nothing is as it seems. What do I want? To go or to stay? I decide to do both.

OCTOBER 2009: After resigning from my job as the manager of a community therapy practice, I'm sitting in a lecture hall again for the first time in ages with a thermos full of coffee and feel free.

JULY 2013: I fulfil my childhood wish of learning to ride a horse.