Nervous Breakdown

There is a moment when it is no longer possible. Not in a figurative sense, not as a low mood, not as a tired day. Truly not. You sit there and cannot get up. You are supposed to function and cannot form a single thought. You hear words and do not understand them. You cry, and the tears will not stop. Or you do not cry — and that is almost worse, because then there is nothing left but an icy emptiness in which you can no longer find yourself.

Some people experience a nervous breakdown like a wave that knocks them over — suddenly, without warning, in the middle of the day. Others sense how something in them has been growing brittle over weeks, until at some point the last support gives way. Still others experience it as a slow dimming — as if someone had been turning down the light inside them piece by piece, until nothing was left with which to go on living.