Rose is home now, but rather in the wars. I’ve dressed her injuries, watched an episode of Wire in the Blood to wind down, and now she’s sleeping.

She has a severely sprained ankle with tendon and ligament damage, there’s possibly some small fractures too but the swelling was making the xrays difficult for the doctors to read. We need to go back to a hospital for more tests. She’s in a lot of pain and getting very broken sleep.

I’m glad she’s back. It’s going to be interesting going while she’s only able to hobble and can’t drive though.

I’m sad and contemplative. I’ve been having these intense dreams about sex and personal power lately. They’re so real and thought provoking. Sometimes dreams feel so rich with meaning to me, a conversation with myself in the night where nothing is censored, where everything is spoken in the language of the night.

I also had a big meeting yesterday. We’ve finally figured out which one of us is best at handling situations like that, where someone with a lot more clout and power is talking to us. Historically we either submit or rebel. We’ve been working so hard on figuring out how to engage, respectfully, but still able to speak our own truth. We did really well at this meeting. Initially our mood was celebratory. Over time it shifted. Now I feel sadness for the challenges of relationship and communication. I keep thinking of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the questions it raised about what it is to be human, about how functioning in the world forces is to compromise our own identity. I’m re reading Something Wicked this way Comes at the moment. Dad and Will talk about what it is to be good, and if being a good person protects you, and how sometimes, being good and being happy are states that don’t get along.

I’m proud of myself, and excited by what this new skill means – by the voice it gives me, the sense of power to stick to my guns and be honest even when it’s very stressful. If I can speak honestly in the places where power is very unequal, to maintain a sense of my own integrity and my personal power even in situations where I’ve been given so little voice and no power at all, there so much more I can do. I can have conversations with funding bodies, or psychiatrists, or CEOs. I can speak on behalf of vulnerable communities, or invite them to the conversation, or protest poor practices, or pitch ideas so much more effectively.

And yet, I’m left with a lingering sadness. A sense of compromising myself in some small way it’s difficult for me to define. Of speaking of sacred things in the wrong language – not enough poetry. Not enough vulnerability. No blood visible. Do those who don’t bleed have the right to speak for those who do? To speak of anger, or sadness, or disappointment when they don’t feel it? Will there ever be a reckoning where the corpses are laid out? Well it ever be allowed to weep at the funeral? Is it this blog here that gives me chance to unpick my own image and become the raw human underneath? Somehow in speaking for myself I’ve lost the right to ask that I be treated as a person too, not merely a mouthpiece. For my pain to be heard also.

I’ve had strange dreams of late. One foot in this world, one in the other. After everything we do, there’s the come down, switching through the system as everyone gets updated, has thoughts and feelings of their own. Elation, power, voice, sorrow, poetry. Is what I’m feeling just loneliness? Sometimes the more you connect, the more you realise you’re different, strange, and in some ways, lost. The clearer you understand one another the more clear it becomes that this is not your place, not your home and family, not your tribe. Even when the losses get counted, there’s no sympathy, no reaching over the gap to hold a hand, no room for tears. It’s home and night when the poems flow and the true cost is counted. I know I’m not alone in that.