I Couldn’t Think Of A Title For This

so I free-wrote instead.

so I free-wrote instead.

Photo by Gabriele Diwald on Unsplash

It’s been one of those days.

I’m cocooned in bed, surrounded by bags of my carefully-sorted possessions and listening to the rain.

This is all that I know; this is all that I am; and here I am, coming full circle.

It feels like this moment has been a long time coming.

The sense of an ending; a breaking of old that is at some level perhaps the only precursor to all things new.

For we can only go so far whilst still holding on to what came before.

I’m moving. I’m leaving.

And yet of course our ghosts still live on.

Here are mine:

At the age of ten, I was diagnosed with an eating disorder.

At twelve, hospitalised.

At fourteen, sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

At seventeen, “released” into the wild.

At eighteen, the (physically) sickest I’d ever been.

At nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and twenty-two: slowly but surely, moving beyond.

I’m twenty-two now and (touch wood) doing pretty well.

Who’d have thought it?

When I first started using food …