Content Warnings for general discussions of mental health with a focus on mental breakdowns, trauma, depression and surviving abuse.

It is easy to fall back into old habits, especially ones that aren’t particularly healthy. That’s the problem with a lot of coping mechanisms: they worked at one point. After all, whatever it was, whatever pattern of behavior you developed, it helped you survive whatever you were going through and now it is here to stay. Or at least drop by for unexpected visits once you’ve managed to expel it from your home. For instance, I have a pair of playlists that I’ve written about before. I recently emptied one of them out because it didn’t really reflect how I was feeling these days and started filling it back up again. I’d heard this song, one I’d saved on my massive “I enjoyed this song” Tidal playlist, called “Nausea” by Jeff Rosenstock. The lyrics tell the story of someone who has gone on a self-destructive spiral, cutting themselves off from the people they care about and the support systems that once helped them through the troubled parts of their life, all in an effort to avoid talking about their future. I heard it one time and it has been stuck in my head for weeks now, absolutely refusing to leave no matter what I do.

In an effort to process my way through whatever this was, I started putting more songs into the playlist and, at some point, the name of the playlist changed in my head to “songs to hate myself to.” Which isn’t really a proper title for the playlist given that the themes of the included songs are all about feeling inadequate, embarking on self-destructive spirals for bad reasons, and the rocky road involved in surviving the things one does to oneself. A more accurate title would probably be “songs to feel insecure to” since that probably better encapsulates the nature of the problem working its way through my head. Unfortunately, I developed this habit back in high school, of listening to music that made me feel things since I wasn’t able to deal with my emotions when they come from inside me, so the habit has a pretty hefty layer of self-loathing baked into it. Not because I was in high school, mind you, but because of the other parts of my life that coincided with high school.

I’ve never had a “proper” mental breakdown. I’ve had panic and anxiety attacks, sure. I’ve had moments of almost losing it in the parking lot because I dropped my key fob between my seat and the center console when I accidentally killed my engine in a busy parking lot. I’ve started storming off as a joke and then, because of how much I had going on in my life, it turned into really storming off as my negative emotions overwhelmed me as a result of given them a tiny crack they could absolutely rip open. I’ve even had to swear (as in “swear an oath”) myself out of having a meltdown in a Costco. But I’ve never actually broken down. I’ve never had a self-destructive spiral. Hell, I’ve never even engaged in directly self-destructive behavior of any kind. I’ve never drunk my problems away, bought things I couldn’t afford as some kind of retail therapy, or even just vanished into silence for a few days, let alone do something like leave town for a week or failing to show up for work. I’ve always kept it together, sometimes at the last minute, but always.

So when I realized that the song that was stuck in my head, that refused to leave for weeks on end no matter what I did, was about someone in a self-destructive spiral, I thought that maybe something in the song spoke to me. After all, the singer was in the middle of a breakdown. They were able to give up on life for a little while. They were able to engage in self-destructive behavior in a way that, after some more active discernment, I realized made me feel kind of jealous. I never had that chance, back when I was dealing with all of my childhood abuse. I didn’t even have the chance while I was dealing with my childhood trauma while in therapy as an adult. I spent my youth learning to survive and enduring because I couldn’t stand the thought of having been through all that for nothing. I lived on such a thin margin as an adult (still do, too) that I couldn’t afford to miss work or spend frivolously. I can’t afford an alcohol or drug problem. I can barely afford my book problem (rampant escapism). I’ve never had the time or the space where I felt secure enough to let myself break down. I’ve had to keep it together every single time something happened because I learned the importance of survival as a child and am still waiting for the moment when I can let all the tension drop and commence the explosive decompression that will inevitably follow.

I don’t know that such a moment will ever come. I’m sure I’ll achieve some form of financial security eventually and find some people I can have around me who I feel comfortable and secure with, but I’ve spent so long putting this moment off that I’m not sure it’ll happen anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever hit a point in my life where that kind of behavior takes over my life since I’ve become so ruthlessly focused on making the correct long-term decisions. Which is probably a great thing. I bet there are a lot of people out there who wish they had the ability to always choose the best option for long-term positivity since it’s not like I’m sacrificing the entirety of my present comfort for some potentially better but ultimately unknown future. I just can’t ignore the fact that I am this way because I had to survive my childhood. I can draw a line between the warp of my childhood, the weft of my early adulthood, and the fabric that makes up my life today. It’s not a fun thought to confront, to be completely honest. To know that you’re as pragmatic and forward thinking as you are because that was the only way to survive and rationalize your childhood. To know you’ve never had a secure enough life to be able to afford a breakdown. To know that you’re always going to be “alright” and to wish that, sometimes, you could be anything else even if its awful just so you aren’t the same thing forever.

Unlike most of these posts, where I get to the end and say that I don’t have any answers, this time I actually have one. It doesn’t feel like a great answer, but answers to problems like these ones–the thorny process of unpacking your trauma, dealing with it, and then tidying up whatever remains–rarely do. As far as I can tell, and I’ll freely admit that I really only speak for myself here, the best solutions is to just keep going. Breakdowns, especially those that devolve into patterns of self-destructive behavior, aren’t a good thing. They’re not fun. They’re incredibly stressful and at least mentally damaging, though they’re often physically damaging as well. It is a good thing, to be able to keep it together so you can express your emotions in a healthy manner that doesn’t hurt other people (this reminder is actually how I kept it together in the Costco, since I didn’t want to subject anyone to a large white masculine-appearing person losing their temper over something that wasn’t their fault). This regret I feel for never having the chance to break down is the same regret I feel for choosing to cut off my biological family. I understand the impulse that fuels the regret, but I know that giving in to the regret would be far worse than any other choice I could make. All of which isn’t to say that it is a moral failing to have a mental breakdown or that you’re weak if you have one. I’m just saying that, in every case I could have had one, a mental breakdown would have only made things worse.

With all that said, with the old habits identified, I think I can correct my course and work my way out of this. It’ll help that I’ve got a therapy appointment coming up, but I’ve always been pretty good at working through this stuff on my own before my therapy sessions. I often just get confirmation of the progress I’ve made and some more expert opinions about the work I’ve done. Which are incredibly helpful, mind you, just not the same as the process I use to work through it all myself. Until then, though, I’m going to make use of the long weekend I’ve given myself (a four-day weekend prior to this being posted) and clean my apartment from top to bottom. I’ve been letting the deeper cleaning slide and my apartment really needs it, so I’m going to switch off the ol’ brain for a couple days, clean the crud out of my apartment, and then spend a couple days just working through everything on my own before I have to go back to dealing with people.