Confessions of a Prickly Plant

I have not posted from this particular blog for some time.

It’s hard to find inspiration when you’re seeing the world in shades of grey and beige. I have had no desire or motivation to write, or take photographs, or even trawl the internet for beautiful, beautiful things created by others with wider palettes. Every door I’ve turned to for escape has been locked fast.

I am determined to return my colours. Stroke by stroke, pigment by pigment. It’s going to be a slow process, but I need to take back control now, or I may never be able to.

Questioning why I have only just stumbled across Richard Burton’s recitals of Dylan Thomas’s poetry. 

“She didn’t recover in the intensive care unit, and after twenty-four hours or so, she was ‘transplanted’. Her kidneys went to two different adults, at opposite ends of the country. Her corneas gave sight to someone who’d been blinded. Her liver went to a reformed alcoholic. Her pancreas and small intestine went to a teenage boy who suffered a rare genetic condition that meant he couldn’t absorb food. Of her major organs, only her heart and lungs - which had brought her to the gateway of death - and her brain - which had travelled too far into the darkness to make it back to the light - were buried with her.”

Sabrina Benaim - ‘Explaining Depression to My Mother’

“Mum still doesn’t understand;

Mum! Can’t you see!? That neither can I!”

Trying to explain mental illness to a parent who has never suffered mental illness is so, so difficult - no matter how caring they are, how sympathetic, and how much they want to help. We butt heads now over the smallest of thing, and I know now that she’ll never, ever ‘get it’.