No one looks, no one stares

Hair brushed back from an ideal profile, summer sheer whites draped on well-proportioned shoulders, slim pants fitted to skim her straight back, she positions herself a bit off McDonald’s entrance on a plant box on Granville Street, and as if from a view deck aims her sight in the distance—apparently the cross street, where pedestrians cued by traffic lights either stop or walk or somehow march like marionettes.

Nothing unusual until she booms as we board the No. 10 bus to downtown: “All in order, safe and covered, Surgeon General to Commander-in-Chief. Quiet on enemy lines. Mess cleared and spiffy. Reporting at 1300 hours.” No one looks at her, no one stares, but the snoop that I am of inner spaces, I do through my shades, recognizing a dead ringer to Major Margaret J. “Hot Lips” Houlihan, portrayed by Sally Kellerman in the long-running TV series on the Vietnam War, M*A*S*H.

Never rumpled or greasy on her daily rounds—sometimes on the opposite side of the street on a bench by the library, talking down to a subordinate officer about secret codes; her war, as I have since gathered, seems WWI, unlike Major Hot Lips’ Vietnam. Quite a juxtaposition though, that she carries over in monologues about the state of the military, which had snagged a couple of old guys once, who, in the end, began to creep away.

Raging and ranting, heard through all of Granville a few early evenings, some days, Linda, as I later learned from a neighbor, would appear calm, people-watching from the bus stop; I had even boarded the bus with her, me, quite nervous as she took the seat behind mine. And then, still nervy, attempting to push the stop button ahead of my stop, I heard her say, “Not your stop, honey.”

Indeed, normal appearances somehow always prove debatable until what’s apparently “normal,” up close begins to strangely amuse or terrify. Take a mild-looking, round-faced young man—huge curls framing baby cheeks and droopy eyes—often, seated from across me in the bus, who re-enacts with three invisible friends, the day he was fired, leaning to his right and left side while he covers his mouth, and nods straight on for the third character seated on mine in a monologue accented by hisses, some giggles, and snorts.

A number of others, lost yet very much on the streets, seem milder. Many more certainly roam around or crouch hidden in inner dens somewhere. According to statistics, “Mental illness costs the Canadian economy $51 billion each year in lost productivity—every day, 500,000 Canadians are absent from work due to a form of mental illness… and 8 percent of Canadians will experience major depression at some point in their lives…”

Unfortunately, in the health system, “mental illness represents (only) 15 percent of Canada’s healthcare burden but receives just 5 percent of healthcare funding, and just one-third of Canadians who need mental-health services actually receive them,” Major Hot Lips and the young man, as I’ve learned, among those on medication.

Quite increasingly, an even more insidious form of mental illness has since alarmed Canadians into pooling together, namely, the secret and unlikely killer called “depression,” which can lead to suicide, can cause undiagnosed illnesses, and devastates the self. And because withdrawal and silence seem to be its ugly Hydra-head, corporations like Bell Telephone that launched a campaign dubbed, “Let’s Talk,” and “The Jack Project,” spearheaded by Eric Windeler, father of Jack, an exceptional student at Queens University in Toronto found dead from suicide in his dorm, have stepped in not only to create awareness but also programs to break through inner walls.

Haven’t you and I known someone “odd” in our lives? I did, among those that roamed around town in my childhood—the old-timer who wore the same suit with which he sailed home from the US, muttering in English, for one, and a young woman, from across our house, said to have been given a vial of Cantharides to drink, forever haunting spaces with a hand on her right cheek, as if preserving a kiss.

The snoop that I was in childhood has grown more curious with age, deeply convinced that beyond the visible carapace people see, hear, touch and sense in us, we exist in multiple inner worlds. In them, we transform, transmute and create our own selves, constantly questioning and hardly ever finding answers. But how can we, volatile energies that we are who keep tearing down crumbling structures, yet simultaneously rebuilding, restoring, and renewing in a cycle identified as growth and development in psychology and psychiatry?

Indeed, a body alone, by itself, is a universe; yet while it can reveal minute workings, it does much more than what can be measured, doesn’t it? Hence, the task could not be but more daunting than outer-space exploration. While out there, mysteries offer hints as to their seeds and though infinite in their unfolding, there’s solid material from which to begin, within us, tangles remain clueless and the only way to disentangle them apparently would be to dive into uncharted oceans.