For a number of years, I had a pretty normal life. While my mum was constantly moving from one nearby place to another, continuing to have many and brief boyfriends and the quick leg-overs with my dad—my starting over had been going well.

There was always a restlessness that existed within my mum, so she felt unable to stay living in one place for too long. It was like she had a nomadic soul, that just had to keep on moving. It would invisibly be at the helm of everything that she was. It prevented her from ever settling in one place. It prevented her from ever settling with one man. It prevented her from ever being a settled mother.

The older I got, the more I recognised that my mum was fighting something inside of her. She would try to hide it, but it would invariably explode from her at any given time. I began wondering what had made my mum become the woman that she was.

Her aggression.

Her unpredictability.

Her pretending.

Her promiscuity....

..... there must have been a reason for all of them.

But it often scared me to wonder such things, because wondering what had put my mother's demons inside of her, made me remember my own inside of myself.

I couldn't go there.

Starting over was starting over...so I had to let my mum self destruct with no questions asked.

So much had been taken from my early childhood, I wasn't going to let the same thing happen as I approached my teens.

I just wanted to be normal.

I just wanted to be a normal teenager.

And for the most part, I was.

When I look back on my early teens, I am immersed into memories of being an 80s kid. I was obsessed with Bucksfizz and Madonna. My favourite films would become ingrained in my life, and I would just love to use quotes from them in my everyday conversations with my friends. Even though I was quite a tom boy, for youth club and school discos, I would love to wear Ra-Ra's and long neon pencil skirts. Make-up was electric blue eyeshadow and mascara, with shocking pink shimmer lipstick—it was fun discovering who I really was.

I had many friends, both locally and in other nearby towns.

I was attending a good school.

And I always had my nan and gramp.

I became impressively good at athletics, gymnastics and long jump. Excelled in English language and literature, but was exceedingly crap at maths, DT and art. Surprisingly, I could play the glockenspiel, but sadly, no other instrument. I was head librarian, I was also on the school council, yet got politely asked to leave the school choir because little ole me sang far too loudly and enthusiastically for the music teachers taste.

In private, writing and singing both became huge passions of mine. I would write a daily diary and jot down lyrics for songs that I thought I would one day create. In my bedroom, I would sing alone for hours and hours, imagining that my bedroom carpet was my stage and my hairbrush was my mic. Sometimes, I would even sit on swings or find somewhere that was quiet and scenic, then sing to only the wind that would softly blow in my face. Yeah, I was actually having fun discovering the teenage Mary Rose.

It was great just being a normal girl. But my kind of normal and other girls' kind of normal, was often very different. While a lot of my friends were all wanting their first boyfriends, I was still happy to play with my Sindy Dolls and Action Men.

I think my past, had made it hard for me to want a boyfriend. It made intimacy feel almost sinful. Besides, I had become a teenage girl who didn't want to have just any teenage boy. I was a young and passionate soul, who had to feel passionate about who she would let into her life.

The numbness, the hardening...it was all still there.

So, it would take a special boy to get through my invisible veneer. I never thought I would meet such a boy, but one evening, Lucy took me to a birthday party of another one of her friends, and it was there, that I first met him.

The first time I saw that beautiful boy, I honestly felt like the world had stopped spinning. The world had paused, just to allow him to unknowingly creep into my world. "Who is that?" I had asked Lucy, unable to stop staring at this unknown boy.

"That's Liam...one of the most popular boys in my school." And just like that, my heart heavily dropped into the disappointed pit of my teenage stomach.

Even though I was a well-known and well-liked girl, I wasn't the kind of girl that boys fancied. I was the girl that boys only wanted to be friends with. I wasn't really a girly-girl, I was happiest in stained shorts and dirty trainers, going on bike rides and playing tennis. Being in the most fashionable of clothes, with the most fashionable of haircuts; wasn't at the top of my teenage life.

I thought deeply about many things, so would often find a lot of my peers to be immature and childish. Unlike many of them, it really didn't matter to me about being the most fancied girl in school—I was just glad to be a normal girl in a normal school.

But Liam, I wanted him to notice me.

I wanted him to be my first ever boyfriend.

Life will always be about lessons, and I was to soon learn all about unrequited teenage love.