The art of breaking down.

Collapsing takes some serious effort. Your life crumbling around you is something that doesn’t come easy to most people and when it does it’s pretty challenging to understand what’s going on since you basically feel surrounded by rubble.

I’m usually pretty levelheaded; cool, collected, etc. But that doesn’t actually last forever, every year since my senior year in high school I’ve had this exact moment where I can feel things falling apart around me. My whole universe seems to fall apart and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to stop it.

I view my life as a house. Walls, windows and people inside of it. It’s both very complex and a pretty easy way of understanding how I choose to compartmentalize my life. My girlfriend is a person in a room, my job is another one and my family another one. Some of these rooms are connected through doors that sometimes have people by the door, think about friends of a friend. As such you wouldn’t try to enter certain rooms without an escort, because that would be weird.

With that said, this house constantly faces some structural challenges since we’re seemingly under constant construction. Some of the rooms under this roof were very poorly constructed since funds were…misappropriated. This means from time to time, due to natural fluctuations in the atmosphere around this dwelling some rooms collapse and others get hit pretty heavily by the ensuing debris.

Every year, erratically since my adult life doesn’t have pre-set vacation times, my brain decides it’s time for a little reboot and tears the house down to the ground. That does mean some people get crushed in the process, rooms fall apart and the house is generally in disarray for a short period of time.

This happens every so often because I neglect some of those rooms so much that they’re not adequately prepared to withstand that change. As the house falls I’m left feeling slightly distraught and confused for a while. It’s a process I’m working to counteract, but had limited success doing so.

For the people closest to me, this is a time when I seem withdrawn and maybe even bored or bothered with most things. For people outside of the aforementioned I just seem impatient and annoyed.

The natural order of things though states that after every collapse I must rebuild so I do. I put up the walls, invite people in and make sure everything is taken care off until I get distracted and neglectful which just means I’m at that point again.

There is no lesson, no foreseeable solution. I’m not sure how to prevent it from happening at this time in my life and don’t expect to stop it at any given rate. I get bored and sidetracked by my own life in a way that prevents better housekeeping, it happens. Sometimes your life will get a little grimy and it will undoubtedly feel like the walls around you are on the verge of coming down.

But as I quickly learned after noticing what was going on there’s one thing that’s certain. Accepting the inevitability of certain things, collapse, failure or the possibility of success is part of what make up every waking moment. I go to bed knowing that at some point, somewhere, something will go wrong and I won’t be able to stop it no matter how hard I try.

As with everything else, there is a reason I put this in writing and it’s an effort to reach out and share, both my obsessive analysis of my psyche but also the current state of affairs.