Walking Around: Ripples in Chaos

I have started many blogs and, for various reasons, have fallen away from them over time. Lately, the urge to write has been gnawing at me but needs some separation from what came before. I am not suggesting that the happiness or angst of the blogs that came before would be "tainted" or needs to exist separately from this part of our lives. It is not a way to closet or hide what is, inextricably, part of the fabric of our family. Instead, I feel compelled to write about it manically, that it needs attention in a wholly new space and, perhaps, with a fresher audience's eyes, more to clarify my own thoughts and swirling understandings.

It is no secret that our family struggles with mental illness. It is no secret that it effects every single person, like a ripple, even through otherwise choppy waters. It is an odd image, isnt it? After all, if the water is already disturbed, how deep can a ripple shake it further? What is the true cost of *just one more thing*?

You'll indulge my metaphor, even if it falls apart, somewhat. It is the only fitting thing to describe how I exist in this here, in this now. Sometimes the waters ebbs and sometimes it flows. Some moments float along, deceptively calm; the undercurrent swift, deep, and unpredictable in its hunger to drag me under, to toy with me, to crush me before releasing me, gurgling in delight as I bob forth, gasping for air, frantic for the shoreline.

One of the things people will often tell me is that I *look* okay. As though there is an expectation of physical weakness in emotional turmoil. As though the veracity of my claim is thrown in doubt because I present a facade that passes as good. Great, even. But faces, bodies, or even actions aren't what is important in mental illness. I can look fine to you and you will never know whether I am unable to catch my figurative breath, whether I am, in that moment, a nose under the water, or if I have just broken through the surface.

And I can't even tell sometimes where I am either. And that inability to feel anything in a concrete way often manifests itself in just saying, I'm fine. When I am most certainly not fine. When I am so far from ok that I cant even conceive what fine might actually look like. Because, it feels like it has always been this way. That this fogginess shredding my moments, my hours, my days, is a normal state of fine, when it is, in fact, *phine*

Click here to jump to Canadian Mental Health Week info.

And so it goes.