What if you're not in Crisis-What if you're in Transition?

For a long time, I believed I was having mental health crises. That was the language I was given — the only framework that made any sense of the intensity I was experiencing. The overwhelm. The shutdowns. The sense that something huge and unbearable was happening inside me, and no one could see it except through a lens of pathology.

I didn’t know how else to describe it, so I used the words the system gave me. I said I was unwell. I said I was struggling. I said I needed help.

And people nodded and told me I was brave. That I was doing the right thing by “seeking support.” But underneath it all, I knew something didn’t quite fit.

Because the truth is, not everything that looks like a breakdown is a breakdown.

Sometimes what we call crisis is actually transition — the dismantling of a self that was built for survival, not truth. The dissolving of old defences, outdated identities, inherited beliefs that no longer align. It’s not chaos for the sake of it. It’s a reordering. A deep, slow, often disorienting kind of becoming.

But we don’t have a language for that in most mental health spaces. The frameworks don’t stretch that far.

We call it risk.

We call it relapse.

We call it instability.

Because we’re trying to manage something that isn’t actually a problem — it’s a process.

What I needed during those times wasn’t containment. It was context. I didn’t need someone to calm me down, or write up a new care plan. I needed someone who could see what was really happening and say: “This isn’t a crisis. This is a crossing.”

The system doesn’t do thresholds very well. It likes definitions. It likes plans and metrics and language that fits inside a diagnosis. But transformation — real, lived, soul-level transformation — doesn’t move like that. It moves in waves. It moves through you and unravels you and rebuilds you in silence.

It can look like insomnia, or crying on the floor, or not being able to speak without your voice shaking. It can look like pulling away from everything that once made sense. It can look — to the outside world — like you’re breaking.

But what if you’re not?

What if the confusion is just a sign you’re leaving one version of yourself behind, and you haven’t quite landed in the new one yet?

What if this isn’t the end of you — but the beginning?

That’s what I’ve come to understand. Not because someone taught it to me, but because I lived it. Over and over again. And somewhere along the line, I stopped calling it crisis. I started calling it transition. And that small shift in language changed everything.

It gave me back my dignity.

It gave me back my agency.

It gave me back the right to decide what was happening inside me — without needing to be fixed for it.

So if you’re in it right now — in the fog, the ache, the strange in-between where nothing feels solid — please know this: you’re not going backwards. You’re not falling apart. You’re not failing to cope.

You might just be shedding what’s no longer yours to carry.

And that’s not something to be ashamed of.

That’s something to be honoured.