You can just sing

Button-minded

I've gradually, and then suddenly, grown apart from being such a tiny thing. I'm still quiet, still little button-minded, blossoming right out of an open palm. But maybe I'm a touch louder, a touch more upfront, a little heavier too- with open things, with possible things and hopeful things, a shock of mess but a smile to go with it. I think about holding hands a lot of the time, rubbing shoulders, and I help elderly ladies carry their bags onto their buses, chat to them about their grandchildren, and I don't feel lonely when they smile back at me. I think too about dancing, about how I'd like to try it again in the New Year with my girl friend. I've become fresh water running down skin and wettened eyelashes. I don't know if I'll ever be comfortable in my own skin because I haven't felt connected to this body since I stopped feeding it for the first time, and then forgot how to feed it completely. I'm really making it up as I go along, but I do feel some connection to something else- something that isn't my physical self but something like threads, stretching and contracting with every movement I make. And I think of interconnectedness. I think it so strange that now I'm more aware of my little button-self but somehow not so terrified. Somehow established and sinking into a bottle of warm, brightly coloured sand.
I think Ella would be proud of where I am. I miss her more than I can possibly say. I never believed in an afterlife really, but I hope there is one, just so that eventually I can get there and see her again.

Spills and sunlight and sanity

I understand, and maybe you do too, what it's like to hold your hair back from your face, reach further and further into nothing, and end up staring at the wall. I am still relatively young, or at least look very much younger than I am, yet my back has been all twisted. I have felt heavy, a balloon, a glass full of salt, a floater. I have experienced days where I am that and then I am this and then I am that again, and I forget that nothing is permanent. I think I'm learning that I can map out safe spaces for myself. Coaxing weeds and daisies from sleep, spill a little water from a jam jar of plucked pansies, shake some sunlight out like dice from a palm; a calm chatter, a trickle, an almost totally silent collision.

I've had a lot of time to contemplate insanity. Back when I used to bang my head against the bathroom wall, or cut open my wrists, or spend months in hospitals, locked behind the doors of those warm wards, echoes of girls and women and boys and men and wasted. 'You remind me of myself, when I was your age,' said D, a woman who was 40, also with a diagnosis of borderline, who had attempted suicide many times and also tried to scratch off her own scalp. I remember thinking in that moment that I was not going to be like her, going in and out of places like that, scratching out my brain. We all had a ticket, and she'd thrown hers away, but I still had mine, and I was not going to make her mistakes just because of a diagnostic label. But what of insanity? Is it a constant repetition, while still holding out for a different outcome? Is it a coincidence or is it something else? Is it a torn up napkin, a hoarded pile of grocery bags, a crumpled ticket? Is it the continuation of rolling a boulder up a hill, fearing the whole time it might roll back and crush you, until you reach the top only to find you were wrong and you aren't safe. But you continue to believe, because you have to.

Confidence in what I can expect from myself has been progressing. What is possible and what isn't? I don't know those answers. I will keep on pushing because I want to believe, it's what matters most to me: hope. Sure- sometimes it seems like a knife through butter and just another chance to get cut, and sure- that can drive anyone mad. Crying in the shower, yelling into a pillow, downing some whiskey and shut eyes and disappear, disappear? No, not this time. I'm shaking that sunlight, scattering across the path ahead. I'll do what I always do and spill the water, but this time it will dissolve all the salt, and maybe it will resurface again, but here's to hoping.

I will dance in heavens that I've never known.
Flowers blooming in places I'll call my own.

The True Reflection

Things I can't do, and things I am not 

Mathematics, even basic calculation
Pose
Speak loudly in public
Confident
Put on make up faultlessly
Speak knowledgeably about politics
Chat on the phone
Organised
Stable
Graceful
Roller-blade
Give up hope

Things I can do, and things I am 

Apologise
Use British sign language
Take good portraits
Word play
Clumsy
Bookworm
Understand
Forgive
Writer
Lose a lot of weight quickly
Recite the entirety of The Love Song of Alfred j Prufrock, and Hamlet's soliloquy, from memory
Remember the details of conversations
Keep trying