Your Best Is What You Can Do Without Harming Your Mental And Physical Health, Not What You Can Accomplish

Your best is what you can do without harming your mental and physical health, not what you can accomplish when you disregard it.

It's like:

Sometimes I want my nanny back even though I know she was selling coke on the side and probably endangered my life, all I remember is her hugs and teaching me to sew and making me snacks and not letting anyone hurt me.

And then I'm forced to reconcile how a literal drug dealer who harboured her fugitive adult son was a better mother to me than the woman who brought me into this world.

Sometimes I have an impulse to just cry and yell and scream, over and over, until every mother fucker hears me when I say how fucking terrible she was to me

She sold me. She sold me. She sold me. She sold me. She sold me. She sold me. Shesoldmeshesoldmeshesoldmeshesoldme.

Sincerely, with emphasis: fuck.

her

when the purple faded from her hair she said she liked the way it looked like the ocean the way her lover said her eyes looked in the sunlight; like the ocean the way she felt when her feet were pulled gently, strongly, underneath the sand; by the ocean the way the salt chapped her lips when she overstayed her welcome with the ocean when she said she liked the faded color, the grey green blue- the memories of purple chemicals breaking down the keratin of herself remade, brittle and neon and defiant- she meant because she was seaweed all along grey green blue floating dead in the ocean washed up, sticky in the foam on dry land honest in death smelling of the ocean

"Disabled " is a neutral descriptor at worst. It just means we can't do some things the way other people can, or at all. It's not an insult, and it doesn't mean we're lesser.

Disabled culture is beautiful and wonderful. Disabled people are beautiful and wonderful. We and our worlds are not a misfortune or a consolation prize.

“And I don’t think anybody should feel bad if they get diagnosed with a mental illness, ’cause it’s just information about you that helps you to know how to take better care of yourself.

“Being bipolar, there’s nothing wrong with it. Being bipolar is like not knowing how to swim. It might be embarrassing to tell people, and it might be hard to take you certain places. But they have arm floaties. And if you just take your arm floaties, you can go wherever the hell you want.

“And I know some of you are like, ‘But Taylor, what if people judge me for taking arm floaties?’ Well, those people don’t care if you live or die, so maybe who cares? Maybe fuck those people a little. I don’t know.”

Taylor Tomlinson, Look At You (2022)