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.
