I am an astronaut surfing a wave on the Sea of Tranquillity. I have driven too fast down the motorway to Misery, sailed too far on the sinking ship to Stress and almost lost my head on the bullet train to Oblivion. But now I am gliding gracefully in a positive direction. It won’t be a high-speed journey and I must try to be patient and allow myself to float with the cosmic flow. The coastline is getting closer and Chill-out Beach is just in the next bay.

This is the kind of colossal weirdness that Blake comes out with. Blake is from New Zealand and wears flip-flops even when it’s raining. Sometimes, the stuff he says is so incredibly cheesy that I have to laugh even if I’m feeling miserable. I can’t stop myself. It’s sort of like a rainbow suddenly appearing smack bang in the middle of a thunderstorm. Except that it’s in my head. When the rainbow appears, we both sit back and have a good chuckle because Blake says that laughter is a helpful reaction which leads to a positive feeling. But then, when we’ve finished having our chuckle, he says, ‘Seriously though, Lottie, do you get my point?’ and almost always I nod my head and say, ‘Yeah I do, Blake,’ because underneath all that space-age rubbish, Blake says stuff which makes total perfect sense. He is very helpful and nice and I like him. Also, he looks a lot like Johnny Depp but without the pirate make-up.

Blake is helping me to sort my head out. Usually, my head is a pretty neat place filled up with pop music and poetry and moments of total and utter Laugh Out Loud magic that I share with my BEST EVER friend Goose. Moments like the other day when Goose and me went shopping in town and pretended for the ENTIRE TIME that we were called Janice and Joniece and that we were on a two-week vacation from Kentucky, USA. How I didn’t collapse with laughter-induced breathing difficulties when Goose strolled into Gladbagz and asked to see their latest selection of fanny-packs(1), I will never know. Or like last week when we tested whether it’s possible to eat a whole custard slice in one bite. (It’s not.)

But last term, my head got all messed up.

None of that matters now though. Blake says I must focus on the present and not get hung up about the past. He’s right. If I think too much about what happened - like how I fell down a mental manhole and how I got arrested and how I thought my house would fall down if I got out of bed - I get upset and want to scream. This isn’t a helpful reaction and it doesn’t lead to a nice feeling. So I’m going to bin all those crappy thoughts and focus instead on the cool stuff in my life. Stuff like:

have officially been an item for six entire weeks and how I still fancy his

and how he still doesn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that I have a nose the same shape as a potato. Incidentally, Gareth Stingecombe is the best rugby player in my school. He’s got green eyes and fluffy hair and a big smile and a cute wonky tooth. He floats my boat and tickles my fancy. (Not literally.)

2. How my NUMBER ONE friend in the whole world is Goose McKenzie who just happens to be the coolest and cleverest girl in my school.  Although interestingly, she only got an A grade for her GCSE English coursework folder – whereas I got an A*.

3. How my mum has said that if I continue going to my counselling sessions and also make a good start to Year 11, she’ll buy me a baby rabbit. 

So I’d better start stocking up on hay and carrots right now because Blake says that as long as I keep following the path of positivity, Year 11 should be a box of budgies(2).

When I get my baby rabbit, I’m going to call it Hendrix - whether it’s a boy rabbit or a girl rabbit.  This is in honour of my most favourite dead person who has ever existed.  The Late Great Jimi Hendrix.  He was a Rock God Extraordinaire and the man with the best hair that has ever been witnessed by any living being on the face of this planet.  If I had hair like Jimi’s, I would look approximately like this and everybody at school would be sick with jealousy.