Sara Baume

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

Twenty-six is not significant in a good way. It’s the age at which I become irrevocably closer to thirty than twenty. I wake on the morning of my birthday, and think at once: now I know, with certainty, that it’s too late to be a genius.

What is it about crying? As if my body believes that squeezing all its salt out might somehow quell the sadness. As if sadness is a parasite which suckles on sodium chloride.

I am only ashamed of all the knowledge and ideas which passed me by while I was busy obsessing about circumferences; about a body I never even liked in the first place.