I've not lost my marbles have I?

Picture a million glass marbles of all colors and sizes dropped into a tin can much too small to contain them all but large enough for them to bounce around - just enough room for them to clink and clank against the rigid walls of the can all the while someone is shaking the tin can with a fury that makes the sound painfully loud and shrill and ends in a deafening roar louder than my desire to quiet it. This is how it feels to have high functioning anxiety. And this is my everyday. Some days are worse then others ending in sleepless nights despite every attempt to adopt a fix...new age meditation, 60mg of the latest brand of melatonin, warm milk (gross), tangled yoga poses, gallons of sleepy time tea and any other suggestion or prescription available to my distinct sect of humanity gifted with a torturously tumultuous brain. Some days are blissfully blank of any fast breathing, facial ticks or even a barely noticeable deep set frown. But if I’m being honest I stopped taking a tally of this battle between good days and bad days a very long time ago. Mostly because the battle is not usually won by the good guys and I refuse to give the bad guys any more clout.

For some it feels like a fog rolling in, slowly but ominously. For me it's a violent storm raging at full power and with the speed of lightning. It can be paralyzing, debilitating and at the same time it is a part of me that few people who know me have any clue about. Sometimes I'm left without the bandwidth to actually experience anything other than the storm that is drowning me like a tsunami with a vengeance. And yet my outward experience is quite opposite of that which is transpiring inside my mind and personal life. Because well...life.

Life has an eerie smog that envelops you in its intricate web of chaos and at the same time it can also cleanse you like that old mentholated rub smeared on your chest when sick as a child. It really is a toss up though, depends on how ready you are to accept the truth. The truth that smacks you in the face sometimes when it's tired of being pushed to the side, exhausted by the cloak and dagger battle you wage to hide it beneath the forced smiles and scripted responses.

It's this truth that makes you..well...you. No one is like you, and that is the beauty of humanity. We are each a product of our past, of our encounters with other humans, of our experiences we've had to endure as lone creatures who truly are just simply and at our core...alone. We have friendships, we have love in some form or another, we have family, but in the end no one really knows who we are... do they? Do we?Everything has a pretense. Everything has a cover. Everything has some type of protective shield and not the Harry Potter kind. We wear our armor as if it were our skin and then once naked we see our skin for its true self...who we really are. And it's terrifying. Not because its hideous, not because it's traumatic, but because it's so god awful to risk the notion of someone else seeing it for what is really is. Because at that moment there's no turning back, it's just us. And that my friends is more terrifying than facing ourselves in the mirror. Because in the mirror the only reflection we choose to see is that same soul that has known you for a lifetime and still cannot run away. But when we are staring our truth in the face, it becomes harder to mask our true identity. Our truth comes out in the worst way and we personally yet unwillingly flag our finish line before we even realize we've ended our charade. And then we are stuck, between our alter ego and our self of which we've given a glimpse to the most feared recipient. Someone whose acceptance is most necessary, if only to secure our belonging to our own self. This is the most fearsome introduction. And truly this is the most brutal, most gut wrenching,

Maybe instead of accepting a new reality you really have to think about who you were meant to be. Sometimes that's a good thing. Other times its more of shock. But maybe that is the shock we all need to propel us into the future we never thought we would have. And isn't that the beauty of the future, that we don't know it, that we don't expect it. And how do you figure out your past without figuring out who you were meant to be. So, no, I haven't lost my marbles, I'm simply discovering each one color by color.