Mood Piece January 30 2018

Having a breakdown was bad enough. The loss of control, the choppy dance of apathy and anxiety, the endless loop of thoughts and memories. She would give almost anything to be done with it. What made it worse though, she thought, was the constant pretense of not breaking down at all. A grief shared always seemed a grief compounded, suddenly nor her private misery but also an obligation to calm everyone else. The dirty secret of it all was that you weren't allowed to fall apart. Falling apart meant something was broken, you were broken, and the world would fall all over itself trying to fix you. And so, inevitably, she would set her own pain aside; patched with duct tape and good intentions, to be revisited when no one needed her to prove that she was ok, that she was fine. It was always a game of half measures, half-steps, half-lives and Zeno's arrows.

Sometimes she wondered what would happen if she were to ever see a breakdown through to the end.