12/28/2025
People call it burnout.
Depression.
A rough patch.
A phase.
But what happened to you wasn’t sudden.
It wasn’t random.
And it wasn’t a personal failure.
It was cumulative.
It was years of holding everything together while telling yourself,
“It’s not that bad.”
“I’ll deal with it later.”
“This is just how life is.”
Years of functioning on adrenaline.
Years of staying alert, responsible, capable.
Years of pushing past signals your body sent quietly at first —
fatigue, tension, anxiety, numbness —
and later, more loudly.
You didn’t collapse because you were weak.
You collapsed because denial finally ran out of fuel.
Denial takes energy.
Silence takes energy.
Performing “I’m fine” takes enormous energy.
Especially when you were never actually fine —
you were just surviving inside a system that required you to override yourself to stay included, employed, loved, or safe.
And then something shifts.
Awareness arrives.
You finally see what you lived through.
Who failed you.
How long you adapted without support.
How much you normalised because questioning it would have broken everything sooner.
And once that truth lands, the nervous system can’t pretend nothing happened.
So it slows you down.
It pulls the plug.
It takes away your capacity to perform.
Not as punishment.
But as protection.
This is the part no one prepares you for:
Collapse is not the body betraying you.
Collapse is the body refusing to carry a lie any longer.
A lie that said you could keep going without cost.
A lie that said your limits didn’t matter.
A lie that said endurance was the same thing as health.
You weren’t lazy.
You weren’t unmotivated.
You weren’t “losing your edge.”
You were waking up inside a system that only worked
if you ignored your own signals to survive it.
And once you see that,
you can’t unsee it.
That’s why this phase feels so disorienting.
You’re not just resting.
You’re not just recovering.
You’re dismantling an entire survival architecture —
the hypervigilance, the over-functioning, the self-abandonment,
the identity built around being capable no matter the cost.
That structure kept you alive once.
But it was never meant to be permanent.
And dismantling it is slow.
Messy.
Non-linear.
You didn’t fail at coping.
Coping expired.
Because what you need now isn’t endurance —
it’s safety.
It’s regulation.
It’s a life that doesn’t require you to disappear to function.
This isn’t the end of you.
It’s the end of a system that asked too much and gave too little.
And rebuilding doesn’t start with productivity.
It starts with truth.
