i thought you should know {7/25/18}

My desk is as jumbled as my brain. I'm a shattered windshield these days: broken into a thousand pieces, yet somehow still keeping it together. But one more bump, one more pothole, one more clipped curb and I might come crashing down. 

And yet after all these years, all this work, all the preaching about acceptance and vulnerability and transparency, I don't know how to talk about it. I don't know what to say. The drafts bar of this blog is full of unfinished pieces: all the times I've bottomed out but didn't feel comfortable sharing it. Because this part, the right-in-the-middle part, the lowest-of-the-low part, terrifies me. I don't know how to make it pretty. I can't festoon it with hope. I mean, I know it isn't going to last forever, because I've been through it before. (But for the record, it feels like it's going to last forever. Every. Time.) I know it's going to get better, because it always does, eventually. (And yet...) So I go into crisis management mode. I remove as much stress from daily life as I can. I prioritize sleep and exercise. I write, even though it's hard and I hate everything that lands on the page (including this). I make appointments with my health care providers. And I try to let myself be where I am. 

Which is truly fucking awful.

But it's real. And maybe if I just say it right when it's happening, with no platitudes, no lessons, no warm fuzzy spiritual hugs, it will help someone else say it, too. And maybe if they say it, another person will say it. And another. And maybe, someday, we'll all be able to say it, and then it won't feel like an ugly truth we have to hide until we have the pretty words. Like a horror story we can only tell in the past tense. 

Until then, I'm here. In the shit. 

I thought you should know.