Sara Baume

And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly.

It__ time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.

See how community is only a good thing when you're a part of it.

My mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.

But I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can't be bothered.

So it's as if,' I say, 'I'm okay in my own bones, but I know that my bones aren't living up to other people's version of what a life should be, and I feel a little crushed by that, to be honest, a little confused as to how to align the two things: to be an acceptable member of society but to be able to be my own bones both at once.

There really isn't much wrong with me,' I say, 'it's just that, well, I'm not like other people; I don't want the things they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other people's eyes, and I feel as though they feel they are duty-bound to normalise me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want, you know?

It happens so seldom; I must catch and keep this slender yearning, a rare beetle in a jam-jar trap. But mustering will is not the same as wanting. I lie in the garden and think about all the footsteps between my body on the grass and my pencil-case and notebook on the table in the sun room. All the muscles I have to flex and relax to get myself there.

And yet, here I am. Perceiving everything that is wonderful to be proportionately difficult; everything that is possible an elaborate battle to achieve. My happy life was never enough for me. I always considered my time to be more precious than that of other people and almost every routine pursuit__quitable employment, domestic chores, friendship__nworthy of it. Now I see how this rebellion against ordinary happiness is the greatest vanity of them all.

I decided that if I didn't allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn't have to wake up again and despair.

My mother likes odd numbers and is suspicious of the even ones. She reads a new book every week and is bewitched by black holes in the universe. She describes herself as an optimist but she worries about everything__orries incessantly__orries on behalf of others when she feels they are not worrying adequately for themselves.And my mother misses her own mother, my grandmother, immensely, who only has a past now; who is only allowed to be as we remember her.

I see foxes often, but always they are crossing fallow fields in the distance. Gold flecks on faraway expanses of green. Magnetic to the meandering eye. Enigmatic, unreachable.

Blending into the tinctures and textures of the countryside. The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die.

I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good

I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.

Art, and sadness, which last forever.

How I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it.

I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn't matter whether I've seen the artwork for real or not.