REALITY

 
So, with all the posts I’ve done about the WEGO Awards lately (ceremony tomorrow, dum de da!), I feel like I’ve slacked just a little with some other awards that are much more important to me and to everyone at Canvas, honestly.

Two things:

1. I always slack with these kinds of awards, because the people who give them are wonderfully understanding, and it’s also sometimes a little tricky, trying to figure out how to accept for a community of bloggers.
2. I’m not disparaging the WEGO Awards in any way, but without the support of the people who give us these, we wouldn’t even be in contention for anything like a Health Activist Award.

So, what am I talking about?  This time around is an award we haven’t yet received, and it has been bestowed upon us twice over!

The REALITY Award.  🙂

These things always have their rules, and with this blog, I usually choose to ignore most of them, because they’re things like answering questions and nominating other blogs, which I just don’t feel I can do on behalf of everyone at Canvas.

However, some of the rules to me are not only easy to apply, but ridiculous not to!  The most important of these includes thanking the blogger(s) who bestowed this on us.

The first lovely lady to send this one our way was our very own Summer Solstice Girl.  In her post, she said:

I nominate all my fellow authors over at A Canvas Of The Minds. That’s 17 bloggers in total. They are all amazingly inspiring bloggers that sure know about keeping it real when it comes to Mental Illness and Mental Health. Please forgive me if I don’t include the individual links, after all, there’s 17 of them 😉

This one isn’t precisely for Canvas as such, rather the individuals that make up Team Canvas, but I like acknowledging her sweet generosity here.  It illustrates how we do really feel about each other, the respect, love, and admiration.  And it illustrates what a beautiful soul SSG is, and what a tremendously huge heart she has.  So thank you Ms. SSG!  And for any of you Canvas authors who missed this, now you know you have been given an award!

Someone else who has most graciously bestowed this award upon the community here is the very wonderful Mel, of scienerf.  I truly can’t begin to express what an amazing a woman Mel is; she is kind and thoughtful and willing to reach out to help someone she doesn’t know (I’ll never forget you for that).  In addition, she has been the most amazing support and cheerleader Canvas has had, quite honestly.  We have so many wonderful people encouraging us and rooting us on, but Mel has really been something else, let me tell you.

Questions are supposed to be answered and other blogs nominated, but (as I mentioned), because of the nature of this endeavor, I don’t ever feel it’s appropriate to try to do that here.  So let me close by saying this.

As I’ve made apparent in recent weeks, I am really stoked at the prospect of Team Canvas being recognized by WEGO Health as a finalist, and maybe a winner (*crosses fingers*) for the Best Ensemble Cast Health Activist Award.  But I think I got a little shocked and starry-eyed and hyper-focused a bit on that.  The truth is this.  Being celebrated by our peers, members of the blogging community, readers, mental health consumers, caregivers, anyone looking for a resource on mental health and finding it here is the most validating, wonderful honor I feel like we could ever receive.  It makes my heart swell and gives me the warm fuzzies when I read comments where readers have really connected and found benefit in what we have to say.

Mental illness can really suck, I won’t argue that point for a minute.  But what it has brought into my life, the way it has brought all of us into each others’ lives — my Canvas family, our readers, everyone we have connected with through this — I wouldn’t trade that for 100 years of sanity.  So thank you SSG, thank you Mel, thank you everyone with whom I have connected, everyone who has connected with other Canvas authors, everyone who has come here and found something valuable and worth returning to.

That is the reality of things.

(This piece will soon have a permanent home on our Awards page.)

© Ruby Tuesday and A Canvas Of The Minds 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and A Canvas Of The Minds with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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