10 Things That Happen When Your Life Falls Apart

1. The world keeps moving, running past you, and it doesn’t make sense how it can all keep going on after your life is over. You still have to wake up, make your coffee, pull your clothes on and slap a smile on your face, because reality isn’t going to wait for you.

2. You’ll find that the days and weeks blend together until one morning you wake up with the strangest sensation of pins and needles, like you’ve been asleep for months and your mind is just starting to wake up. It’ll scare you but at least things will stop smashing together inside you like pointless mush.

3. You’ll quickly discover that the easy part was breaking down. The real challenge comes in trying to set all the little shards and pieces of yourself back together, and like a broken glass across the kitchen tiles, you’re bound to cut yourself.

4. You won’t be the same person after it’s all said and done. You’ll look in the mirror and you won’t recognize the face staring back at you and the new shadows in your eyes. But, just because you’re different, doesn’t mean you’re worse. There’s a beautiful fragility in falling to pieces, in finding the worst of yourself and going on anyway.

5. You’ll want it to all be fixed and better at once. You’ll want a fix-it-all solution to the problem, a way to make it right, and there won’t be one. It’ll take effort every single day, mending a little at a time, for the world to turn right-side up again.

6. People might try to help you, maybe even save you, but you’ll learn that you’ve got to be the one to pick yourself up. You’re the one who has to wipe the dust off your knees and wash the blood from your hands. You have to want it, or all the help in the world won’t mean a thing.

7. The Great Collapse may or may not have been your fault (more likely it’s a melting pot of failures and blame) but that won’t matter, not really. Clinging to blame isn’t going to help anyone, least of all you. All that’s left after the fall is the aftermath and where you decide to go from the bottom.

8. Falling apart doesn’t have to happen all at once. It can happen slowly, one tiny, little bit at a time until something vital has been lost without you even realizing it’s gone. People don’t usually disappear in a single moment, they wear down slowly like wind over rocks under the weight of whatever they are carrying around inside them.

9. You’ll lose friends, maybe family members on your quest for redemption. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it, that you’re not worth it, but that sometimes the cost of the war you’re fighting within yourself is higher than you might have hoped. Don’t give up, the people worth having around will stick with you, no matter how far away you are in your own mind.

10. The world is going to feel too big, too loud, and too rough. But that’s living, and living is rough. It can be damn ugly and painful and cruel, but it’s also worth fighting for. Tooth and nail, scars and wounds accumulated and pushed aside. There are going to be a lot of days where you think maybe it’s not worth the effort. You’ve just got to keep collecting those pieces and fitting them together as best you can until you’ve got as many as you need to face the day. Maybe you’re a little shaky, maybe you’re a little unsure, but you’re there and that’s really all that matters in the end.