There comes a point in some lives when a person simply breaks. Everything on the outside is in perfect order at the time. A loving family, work that has gone well, no crisis of any description that anybody could point to or would have recognised. And inside there is a deep sadness that only increases, and a dull ache that will not lift, and a complete inability to explain any of it to anyone.
There is a name for it. The name matters less than what it is doing there. Because it sounds mad to say, and it deserves saying anyway, that for a great many people the best thing that ever happened to them was that period. It is the most painful stretch of a life, in the body as much as in the mind, and it is necessary, and without it they would still be asleep.
That is no consolation to anybody currently inside one. Inside it there is no consolation available and it would be an insult to attempt some. This is written from a long way afterwards, and afterwards is a different country.
What makes it worse
The hardest part is not the sadness itself. It is that everybody keeps saying how fortunate they are. And everybody is entirely right, which is the problem. They are fortunate. Every single item on the list is real and enviable and was wanted very badly at some earlier point.
So each time somebody says it, a little more guilt is added to what is already there, because how does anybody feel this way about a life like that? It seems like ingratitude of the most contemptible sort, the kind anybody would despise in somebody else. And then the suspicion grows that the emptiness itself is a punishment for being ungrateful, which is a very effective way of ensuring that a person never looks at what is actually happening to them.
When everybody around us keeps reminding us how lucky we are, we start to feel guilty even for admitting to ourselves that something is not right. That guilt is a lock, and it is on the outside of the door, and other people are holding it there with the very best of intentions.
What it is indicating
What becomes clear a long time afterwards, and not without help, is this. Years were lived inside an image, and the commitment to maintaining it was so total that contact with the self was lost entirely. Not partially, and not in some areas. Entirely. There was nobody left inside to be contacted.
And the sadness is not a disease that arrived from somewhere outside. It is the signal. It is the only means available to something that has been ignored for fifteen years and has no other way of getting attention. Nothing smaller worked. It had tried a great many smaller things over the years and every one of them was efficiently managed.
So it stopped the machinery, because stopping the machinery was the only thing left that would make anybody look. It is not a punishment for anything. It is the most direct communication a person ever receives, and it is sent by them, to them, at considerable cost.
What comes after
This is where accounts like this usually become dishonest, so it is worth being careful. Nobody emerges transformed. There is no moment of clarity, no resolution, nothing that could reasonably be called a recovery in the sense of returning to how things had been.
What happens is slower and considerably less impressive. A person begins, very gradually, to move away from the image and towards whatever is actually there underneath it. And what they find is that they do not know themselves at all beyond the identities they were given and the ones they built. Most days they feel confused and lost, and some days that never quite resolves.
But there is no longer any loneliness in it, which is the strangest part, because they are in fact more alone than before. And they know where they went wrong and roughly what needs working on, which is not the same thing as being well and is considerably better than not knowing. The distance between being aware and not being aware is only a moment. But a moment can be an eternity depending entirely on when it comes, and for most people it takes a very long time to arrive and costs a great deal on the way.
If any of this is close to where you are now, please speak to somebody about it. Not because there is a solution waiting at the end of the conversation, but because none of it should be carried alone, and carrying it alone is very often the largest part of the weight.
