I have to say that the way I feel about Mum's death has changed. It's not so much the kind of always-there, all-encompassing sorrow anymore. It's like everything has settled down into a more permanent kind of grief. I miss her so much now. I miss the fact that when I came home from busking today I couldn't tell her all about it, as I used to. I miss her cooking. I feel materialistic saying that but it had to be said!

The hardest thing about this new sense of grief is that I am now supposed to be recovered. Friends say they want to help and so on, but whenever I'm asked how I am, do they really want to hear the truth? I know what it's like when a depressive person keeps bringing up themselves all the time - awkward and boring. I don't want to be like that. Yet in a way I want to demand people's attention. I feel that as they're my friends, I have some right to ask for their time, and I wonder why many of them haven't really given it. I don't think they understand that this is not going to be something I'm just going to 'get over', just like that; that even if I say one thing, they should know me well enough to probe beneath all the outer appearance of calm.

In a way, it's my fault, because I don't like letting people see how I feel about stuff. There are very few people in my life that I feel I can be totally open with.

And then there's the difficulty that I can't explain how I'm feeling right now. There aren't any reasons for it; I'm not angry at God or anything; everyone's nice to me and so on -- I am just depressed. That's all there is to it. So why burden everyone else with it?

I heard something on TV the other night, on that new show Commander in Chief. The president's mother said that people expect her to be recovering, to be getting over the death of her husband. But in fact she misses him more and more every day. I agree. Why is it that we are expected to forget our losses? Holes in our lives are not so noticeable early on; it is as we ease back into life that they become all the more apparent.