This was quite an unusual 2 weeks.  I have been on a rollercoaster of emotions coupled with a prison of chaotic thoughts that I couldn’t seem to silence or escape from.  That, friends, is a recipe for our feature guest today: Breakdowns.

Welcome, Welcome, you exhausting fucks… Lucky Me.

But, seriously, I am lucky.  I’ve been there/here before. I am familiar with this chaotic place.  I’ve actually had a long stint where I lived in this place for quite a few years.  I bet some would call it depression – and it is for sure, oh, lord almighty, it is… But I always seem to come out of it.  I emerge different, changed, renewed (for a while) until the next wave starts to slowly make me sink. But when it relinquishes its heavy grip, it then leaves me alone for quite some time (again, years).  And although I think I have begun emerging from it today, I still can’t quite pinpoint what the ingredients are that create such a glorious explosion of terror, fear, worthlessness, self-hatred and just…doom.

Let me be clear.  I did have a breakdown (2 in fact – on the same day), But I wouldn’t consider myself emotionally unstable.  I don’t [typically] inflict my chaos onto others, unless, of course, my relationship with a person is a factor in the breakdown… Even then, when I do unleash, it’s super severe and nasty, but it’s honest.  Which could be considered worse. During the lead up to the breakdowns and during the depression, however, I still actively and forcibly (on my end, not theirs) maintain a social circle, albeit small. I still deploy practices of meditation and emotional control during these times, but I will be honest – it is scary, and lonely, and exhausting.  My energy is zapped, but I still continue normal routines such as work, cleaning, laundry, etc… Workouts drop entirely for a season, but with the emergence from this darkness, they seem to emerge again as well. I’ve considered medication, but I have an internal conviction that my issue isn’t medically related for me [right now] – this opinion is subject to change (However, I support medical treatment of depression and would actually attempt it if I was diagnosed with medical depression).  

This is different.  I believe we too often as a society run to fix.  I feel bad? Fix it now. I feel unhappy? Fix it now.  And that’s not always the way our human souls work. Sometimes, it’s okay, even good, to sit in the depression and funk.  Sometimes it’s okay to feel down. Sometimes, you just need permission to be where you’re at, confused and scared and sad, and like life has no hope.  If we want to live life, it’s a full experience of all emotions that help us do so.  I don’t necessarily see that as bad. It’s when we make life destroying decisions around these feelings that it becomes bad. Sometimes, dear reader, it’s ok to just be where you are.

Last year and the beginning of this year, I was really interested in meditation.  In my learning, one of the biggest lessons that I had to battle to accept, was “Everything is impermanent.”  This terrified me at first and my soul wanted to reject it. Because if that was the case, My friendship with my best friend was impermanent.  My relationship with my boyfriend was impermanent. My puppies were impermanent. Yeah, and they are. It’s the truth, and I just didn’t want to accept it.  After looking at it further, I was starting to find comfort in this truth. Yes, we all will die. So the friendship, the boyfriend and the puppies, are all technically impermanent.  It doesn’t mean, that they have to end in a fiery fight or prematurely.  It just means that eventually, nothing stays the same.

When I flipped this to other areas of my life, wow.  Relief. My experience has taught me this. That long stint of depression?  It finally subsided after about 10 years. It catapulted me into a new world of living.  Everything became exciting again, I met the love of my life, I started to make more money than I ever had (even though the job wasn’t a necessarily fun one – I didn’t care – I was on a life high), I was the healthiest I’d ever been and the strongest.  Everything changed.

Armed with this new knowledge, I knew when I first started feeling the wave of depression hook me under and slowly pull me down these past 6-8 months, I knew it was impermanent.  How long I could last, I didn’t know. But I did know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it couldn’t last for the rest of my life. Everything is impermanent.

Fast forward these past 8 months (as you recall, some major life changes I didn’t really feel all too excited as noted from previous posts) and, Thursday of this past week?  It all came to a fantastical, show stopping eruption. First with work. I cried like I lost my baby. I was undone. I was so overwhelmed. I was thrown so far into the deep end at work, I. Just. Broke.  (Incompetence.)

Step right up, step right up, next comes my utter undoing with my boyfriend.  Cue creepy circus music…

He gets home and we watch a show together… One moment later, I am drilling him on if he really wants a kid, and you better pipe up, you better know yourself to know if you really want that right now or not because I will not be blamed for this if you find out later you do and I’m running out of time to get on board with this kind of idea, you don’t know yourself, that makes me scared because if you don’t know yourself, how can you know if this is good or right with me, I feel unsafe and unstable with you, you only like me when I am mentally strong and happy, I don’t want to perform for you any longer, I am tired, I need to know it’s okay and you still love me even if I am just down, and I need to know you will allow me to exist in this place, and we should take a break, whoa – we’re not going to work out.

Yup, it escalated that quickly in about 45 minutes.  Thank you, Thank you…

As I said, though, many of my unleashes are true.  They just came out as venom from a snake. It was scattered, it seemed all unrelated, and we fought.  Nasty words were further exchanged on both sides. The evening ended up with me weeping in our spare bedroom, heaving, sobbing and he came in and just held me while I writhed and cried.  We went to bed. (Incompetence.)

Yesterday was calm.  He got up and went to work, and gently asked, “Who’s fault is this?” and I said, “Both.”  

I worked.  Work was actually very encouraging.  I felt I had reached a new level or dimension of understanding with work.  A new comprehension of my job. Growing. I was growing. (Competence.)

During a break, I discussed the issue at length with my best friend and person.  She was so encouraging. She helped me walk through it to where I identified my breakdown source.  And the overarching theme in it.  (Competence.)

He came home and we talked through the issues.  I explained how I feel very incompetent at work. I feel as if I am constantly having to perform.  I feel the same at home, with him. I constantly have to perform, be happy, be healthy. We discussed a deeper issue of where we see the world, and what place he comes from when he approaches the world and what place I come from when I approach the world.  It was this discussion that moved us further in helping us relate to each other.  It may have resonated (it may have not). But it did allow me the peace and freedom to relieve myself from having to perform for him ,and hopefully served to earn a little bigger piece of his trust. I was enough on my own. And it was okay I was where I was. (Competence.)

I understand I am glossing over a shit ton of details here.  Those are details for another post another time. The moral of my story here is that breakdowns have always served me well.  Those moments where the thread breaks, and I become emptied and crushed, ground into dust… that is when it starts to become okay. And I don’t know of any person who hasn’t had pain and sorrow as the main ingredient for initiating transformation.  I have yet to find that person who has experienced great, deep, lasting change from happy times.  I know no one who has learned honesty, integrity, compassion, care, from being in a good place.  No, no, those are all forged in pain, sorrow, suffering.  That is why I am okay with depression and the breakdowns. I completely and wholeheartedly believe it’s these moments where we can be melted down and forged into newness.  

I wish I could say it isn’t messy and painful and scary, but it is.  And I am so lucky I have people in my life that want to try to work this humanity shit out with me.  But know, the dark days will come. Don’t be so quick to dismiss or fix it.  They may not last forever (they can’t since all things are impermanent), but these are the breaks. 

Thank God for the Breaks.

Cheers.