I didn’t have to conform it was an instant confessional box that was tucked underneath my bedroom mattress. It was just a scruffy exercise book, stolen from school, but it provided a place where I could write anything.

But with all the secrets within it, it was also my own little weapon of mass destruction. Thoughts and feelings I was ashamed of, or I thought could start a war (not a global one, a school war), could be shut tight in its beige pages. A place where I could be liberated from the smiling public face I felt I had to put on, and just slam everything down in a private thing that was JUST mine. A place where I could threaten world leaders, lust after boys, and be every shade of me… in perfect safety. I needed a place where I could be horrible, sad, sexy, mad and bad, in total safety without judgement. I needed a friend who I could tell ANYTHING to. By age 16, I’d already been in one psychiatric ward. I had terrible dark fears and dark secrets. In fact, in my most anxious moments I realized it could all technically happen in one dreadful day. Being evaporated in a big mushroom cloud was one of my darkest fears, as was NOT marrying Tom Cruise, dying a virgin, failing my exams and being caught masturbating. We were innocents and threats seemed to be everywhere - even when George Bush Sr. It seemed so unfair and terrifying - me and the carrots had done NOTHING. My part of the world was full of farmland and American airbases, making me (and my neighboring root crops), a prime yet inadvertent Russian nuclear target. I was just a no-name adolescent living in a rural part of England. No one important would listen to my concerns, though.

At aged fourteen I decided the entire adult world was clearly completely insane. Could a man who had once tried to play dad to a monkey really make the best informed decisions about the delivery of Intercontinental ballistic missiles? I thought not. Instead I got Ronald Reagan starring in Breakfast with Bonzo. I wanted reassurance about the innate good sense of the people making decisions over my life. I tried to cure my worries by arming myself with knowledge. It was an odd day when I found out that the man with the finger on the button of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal in the Cold War once starred in a film with a chimp. The book also inspired the hulu show, My Mad Fat Diary, which you can stream now.

Rae Earl is the author of the forthcoming memoir, My Mad Fat Diary, available on April 19.

My fat mad teenage diary rae earl