The most counterintuitive thing I did was allow the breakdown I had been holding back for years.Not manage it. Not contain it. Not schedule it into a tidy window between responsibilities and then emerge, recovered, on the other side. I allowed it to happen - fully, safely, and on a timeline I refused to control.That decision was harder than quitting. Quitting had a letter, a date, a set of steps. The breakdown had none of that. It just had me, sitting inside the uncomfortable truth that something in me had been breaking for a long time, and I had been holding it together with sheer willpower and performance and the constant pressure of being available, being on, being useful.I let all of that go. And then I let myself crumble.<h2 id="7074dff7-68ee-404e-aee3-72cddb83b3a7" data-toc-id="7074dff7-68ee-404e-aee3-72cddb83b3a7" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">I Did Not Put a Clock on It</h2>The first thing I had to release was the idea that this had a deadline.I did not know what I was going to find when I went through the wilderness of my mind. I did not know how long it would take, what I would need to face, or what would be waiting for me on the other side. So I did not pretend to know. I did not set a timeline. I did not give myself six weeks and a checklist.From the end of January 2021 through to the end of November, I existed. Ten months. That is what it took. And I want to be honest about that number because I think people underestimate how long real healing requires. When you are auditing your finances and deciding whether you can afford to stop, estimate generously. Give yourself three months at minimum. Aim for six. Be prepared for it to take a year. The timeline is not yours to dictate - it belongs to the process.During those ten months, I did not hustle. I did not line anything up. I did not have anything waiting in the wings to soften the landing or justify the pause. I had deliberately left nothing there, because having something lined up would have given me an excuse to rush the very thing I needed to go through slowly.<h2 id="4a12f1ad-290a-4d6d-aed8-4126807862e5" data-toc-id="4a12f1ad-290a-4d6d-aed8-4126807862e5" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">I Said No to Everything That Pressured Me.</h2>Before I could allow the breakdown, I had to first define what I was actually going to respond to.I made a decision: only what was genuinely life-threatening, genuinely unavoidable, genuinely existential would get my attention. Everything else could wait. Everyone who was waiting for me to suddenly become available again was going to be disappointed. Everyone who expected me to rearrange my timeline for their sake was going to be disappointed. That was not cruelty. That was the first honest boundary I had drawn in years.And I held it across every area of my life.I was part of an alumni group - friends and classmates from secondary school, my version of high school. I had always been fairly active there: chatting, laughing, connecting. I allowed that to continue, but only on my terms. I went when I wanted, I gave when I wanted. No pressure. The moment anything in that space began creating pressure, any obligation, any expectation, any stress I had not chosen, I refused. My older brother, the sibling with whom I had always had the most complicated relationship, wanted to come and stay with me during that period. Even if we had had the easiest relationship in the world, the answer would still have been no. I needed space where I was not performing. Where I was not monitoring anyone else's emotional state. Where every single unit of energy I had could go toward my own. Saying no to him was one of the harder nos I said. It was also one of the most necessary.I also said no to my older sister’s request to house a ward she had been raising since she was about 9 years old. Not a biological or adopted child, but someone she had been raising along with her biological sons. She needed a space to live to attend college in my city. I said no and found and paid for a hostel inside her school for her to reside instead of living with me. Even without needing space for mental, physical and emotional recovery, sharing space with people has always been problematic for me. It certainly wasn’t going to happen when I needed a break from life. So I said no, kindly, politely yet firmly. <h2 id="e9cc078a-1cba-44a8-8981-8da2c308cfd7" data-toc-id="e9cc078a-1cba-44a8-8981-8da2c308cfd7" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Structures Came Down Completely</h2>I gave up all of it. The checklists. The routines. The frameworks I had built to keep myself functional, organised, and productive. All of it came down.I did this deliberately. Because I understood that whatever rebuilt itself from the rubble of that breakdown would be more honest than anything I had been maintaining out of habit or fear. The structures I had been living inside were built by someone who was surviving, not someone who was whole. I needed to find out what I actually wanted to build, what actually reflected who I was and what I needed, and I could not do that while I was still propping up the old architecture.So I let it fall. And I waited to see what remained.<h2 id="c02d7e57-0a76-4c7a-aae1-3e6932191e61" data-toc-id="c02d7e57-0a76-4c7a-aae1-3e6932191e61" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">I Was Less Stringent About My Coping Mechanisms</h2>I want to say this carefully, because it matters.When you allow the breakdown, you also - for a time - allow the coping. I am aware that some coping mechanisms are physically damaging, and I am not suggesting that you abandon management of anything that is already damaging your body. That is not what I did, and it is not what I am recommending.What I am saying is that the things I was using to soothe myself, copious amounts of Netflix, pornography, the things I was using to quiet the noise in my head, I stopped policing myself about them. I stopped layering shame on top of an already exhausted system. Because of the rigid self-punishment, the shame spiral every time I reached for something that gave me temporary relief would have further cruelty to an already painful process.And here is what I came to understand viscerally through this lived experience: addiction, in most of its forms, is not the root problem. It is a response to a problem. It is the way we soothe a truth we have been ignoring. Something fundamental, something critical about how you see yourself and how you move through the world, has been unacknowledged for too long. Addiction is the sound of that truth trying to get your attention.When you finally stop running and turn inward, the truth emerges anyway. And when it does, the need to soothe it through avoidance begins to lose its grip. Not all at once, not even immediately, but eventually it loosens its hold as the hole it was filling starts to close permanently.<h2 id="10d95799-9de8-4a18-8ecb-9283913f64df" data-toc-id="10d95799-9de8-4a18-8ecb-9283913f64df" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">I Turned Toward the Voices I Had Been Avoiding</h2>The voices of self-hatred are loud when you avoid them. They have power precisely because you fear them. Every time you run, you confirm their authority. You teach yourself, again and again, that they are too terrible to face. And so they grow.I stopped running. I turned toward them. And instead of the judgement I had been heaping on myself, I started asking one question.So what?I am experiencing depression. So what? Did the world end because I admitted that? Did the sun and moon stop rising because I laid down to catch my breath?I am not where I want to be mentally. So what? Must I only exist when I am functional and impressive? Is there no version of me that is allowed to be struggling?I am feeling anger and anxiety. So what? What is actually catastrophic here? What is so terrible about not knowing what to do, that I must tear myself apart for not knowing?The "so what" question was not nihilism. It was surgery. It was the precise instrument I used to dismantle the architecture of shame I had built around experiences that were, at their core, simply human. Depression is not a character flaw. Burnout is not a moral failing. Needing a break is not an indictment of your worth. The question forced me to examine, again and again, what I actually believed would happen if I let myself be exactly as I was. And the answer, every single time, was nothing. Nothing catastrophic. Nothing that justified the level of self-punishment I had been inflicting.<h2 id="e4459968-4804-4a1b-85d9-fcb8ce275abc" data-toc-id="e4459968-4804-4a1b-85d9-fcb8ce275abc" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What the Breakdown Actually Gave Me</h2>About a month into those ten months, something quietly humbling happened. The world continued without me.The companies I had left were still running. The projects I had put on pause sat untouched. In fact, one of those projects did not move at all until months after I eventually returned. My neighbours saw me, greeted me, went about their lives. The alumni group carried on. And slowly, I began to understand something I had intellectually known but never truly felt: some of the pressure I had been operating under was manufactured. I had been essential in my own mind in ways that the world simply did not confirm.That is a humbling thing to discover. It is also one of the most freeing.Because what I was also discovering, in the quiet, was the difference between pressure and passion. Between stress and genuine motivation. Between the things I had been doing because I feared what would happen if I stopped, and the things I actually cared about deeply. You cannot learn that difference while you are still inside the noise. You can only learn it in the stillness.My physical exhaustion began to resolve. My nervous system, slowly, started to believe that there was no emergency. And in that space, the inner work became possible. Not the performance of inner work, not the journaling as productivity, not the therapy as optimization. The actual sitting still and facing what was there.One of my deepest fears going into that period was that I might never recover my motivation. That I would lose the drive that had defined me for so long and never find it again. What I discovered instead was something more useful: that I had perhaps been motivated by the wrong things. That the engine running me had been fear and external validation and a self-worth that collapsed whenever I stopped producing.Allowing the breakdown was the only way to find that out. And finding it out was the only way to build something better in its place.If you are holding it together right now, white-knuckling your way through something that is quietly breaking you, I want you to hear this: you are allowed to stop. The structures will fall. Let them. The crumbling is not the catastrophe you have made it in your mind. The world will continue to turn. And when you come back to it, after the stillness, after the wilderness, after the honest and patient work of facing what is actually there, you will find that you are more yourself than you have been in a very long time.Let it break. Rest. The rebuilding comes next.

Allow the breakdown. 
Release all structure and all hold on  what should happen and why. Then your mind begins to reset and settle. You emerge stronger

Healing From The Inside Out: First I Allowed the Breakdown

I Said No to Everything That Pressured Me.

I Was Less Stringent About My Coping Mechanisms

I Turned Toward the Voices I Had Been Avoiding

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Healing From The Inside Out: First I Allowed the Breakdown

Healing From The Inside Out: First I Allowed the Breakdown

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