Writing from a perspective of many years has one disadvantage - the distortions of memory.

I read my previous entry and I see how badly I have managed to mispresent my emotions of the time. It must be the guilt I feel towards my mother, who is gone and whom I am trying to bring back by making untrue confessions. She won't come back. Shocking her with my evil-doing won't bring her back. She doesn't care any more. And I should let it go to and let her be free.

Anyway, here is the correction: I didn't run away to punish my mother. I ran away because I was hurt, she had just slapped me, my face was burning, I was humiliated. I hated her for not being able to control herself. She was just like me - weak. She had forgotten herself. I ran away because I was blinded with anger. There wasn't a shred of controlled thinking in that decision. It was an impulse.

I came back within a couple of days.

When I ran away the next time it was nearly forever. I only managed to come back to say farewell even though at the time I didn't realise it was the end of the road for her. But that's another story.

At 13 I ran away. I had had an argument with my mother over something insignificant but it made me see red. Literally. It felt as if blood gushed all the way from my limbs to my face, filling my eyes and spilling in my brain. I saw red. Over something so insignificant that I couldn't remember it the next day.

I lashed at my mother. Yelled at her, howled at her, screamed in her face so violently and uncontrollably that she had no option but to slap me.

The slap felt like a bucket of icy water. I did calm down and basked in a surge of vicious satisfaction. I can't tell why I felt like that but it gave me the excuse I needed to punish my mother in the most cruel way I could think of - by disappearing.

I am a mother now and I know a mother's worst nightmare is her child gone missing. You could go insane over that alone. In my subconscious mad mind I was able to sense that and so I punished her.

I ran away and stayed in my grandparents' summer house. It was only a few months after my grandfather had died, and the night scared the living daylight out of me. I flung myself from room to room confronting moon shadows and strange noises. If I hadn't been mad by then, I had gone mad that night. I woke up curled up on the floor behind an armchair, covered with books and magazines.

Meantime my mother was living through hell. When I think about it calmly, now after so many years, I wish I had a chance to say sorry.

Depression is a very popular "condition" to have these days, but I resent being branded as some pathetic sod "suffering from depression". It's such an inadequate word! I am not sad, melancholy, or sorry for myself - I am NOT depressed. That's why I refuse to take any more of antidepressants. They can't help me because I am not depressed. What I am is pure and simple - MAD.

Madness is when your brain gets into a vice that squeezes out of it the last drop of reason. That doesn't make you depressed - it makes you full of fury, impatience, fear and angst. You start pacing from the front to the kitchen door: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Your squashed brain starts forming destorted images and those images take life of their own, slither out of our brain, wrap themselves around you and tell you what to think. They are beyond your control. In fact, they control you. It's no good trying to talk over them. They may be only whispering but they're right there in your inner ear.

Madness happens to me. It's not a permanent state. It ebbs and flows like a tide. I didn't use to pay it much attention and it has now become more insistent. My Mother noticed it first (as mothers do - that's their job). So let's start from where it started.

I may have been about 7 when, upon hearing or watching some folk tale about vampires, I came across one in person. As I was walking merrily to school, a car stopped and a man in an unfortunate black suit and even more unfortunate wide rimmed, black hat, came out of it and proceeded to ask me for directions. I panicked. I saw him sink his teeth in me and draining blood out of my veins. I screamed and ran for my dear life.
Since I am talking to you now, you will realise that I had managed to get away alive, but for many nights following that encounter I had incessant visions of that man flying in through my window. I would get feverish, I would cry for help, I would sob as my Mother ran to the rescue to soothe me back into sleep. It had taken me months to come round.

Then there were my temper attacks - avalanches of unprovoked fury.

At last, My Mother took me to a healer. Don't laugh! Everything else had failed and she was at her wit's end. I still remember his name - Harris. He healed people by putting his hands on them. He had a very kind face. He didn't charge for his services, which was a miracle in itself. He put his hands around my head.