I always thought a mental breakdown looked like curling up in a ball and crying yourself to sleep. It took me two decades to realize mine looked different: getting defensive in conversations where nobody was attacking me, clinging to near-strangers to stay anchored, a boozy night bent over a subway entrance insisting I was fine. This is about the quiet kind of breakdown, the one you only recognize years later, and the guilt that keeps collecting rent long after it moves out.
It took me twenty years to realize it. Given my current headspace, available mental capacity and time to reflect on life when not working on building creative and branding solutions in an AI era, I’m taking the liberty to write about this specific and complex topic.
Some might have experienced it, others not. I’ve experienced it a few times too many over the past two decades, and while being in a fairly good headspace now, I wanted to open up about certain aspects of what a mental breakdown was for me. Honestly, I can’t say I realized I was going through mental breakdowns until years later, when reflecting back on it and going like “What the f*&ck was I thinking?”
I was always under the impression that a mental breakdown was about curling up in a ball and crying yourself to sleep, or the equivalent of it. Please note I am not in psychology and not a therapist. I’m just vouching for my personal experience, don’t take it beyond that. With time I realized that my brain went into hyperdrive. I became paranoid, overthinking every interaction, calculating every silence, every word and every action. I remember every conversation, every interaction, but not the rationality behind it. I remember connecting with new and old people (friends?) and that for a while the conversation was ok, then it wasn’t, and it made me reject them, aggressively sometimes. I felt mocked when maybe there was no mockery to be had. I felt played, maybe because of how my experience unfolded. You see, I had just experienced some pretty hard life-changing events and I thought I was ok.
So, here I am in the DR, under the sun and the palm trees, recently hit by life again (not as dramatic this time). It was just a contract I had this year, and it was pretty mentally draining due to the toxicity of a single person I worked with. I took it personally when truly, it wasn’t. It’s just business. But that’s not the point of this reflection.
This is about what comes after. Like I said, I have the terrible habit of remembering every interaction I had with people, especially the negative ones. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty bad human design flaw to have. Pain is always more vivid than happiness. So, coming back to one of those conversations from a decade ago, I remember how defensive I got chatting online, how critical I was, and how I truly was under the impression that someone was mocking me or messing with me while I was in a fragile headspace. The rationality of the answers and conversations we host is not great. Paranoia is not great. But even years later, I feel the guilt of my own replies and answers. The same way I feel guilty for having been emotionally destabilized by my recent contract, for feeling like I “let” myself be played, all in the name of “survival”. We need money, therefore we put aside pride and integrity to get by. Everyone I worked with there was doing the same. I saw too many people turn a blind eye to shady behaviors, to unreasonable demands, to unprofessional conversations. All to simply keep their jobs. Some feel guilty about it, some don’t.
In my case, I feel shame for not having stood up for myself higher, louder, and shut down some people when it was time to do so. Fear was stronger in that moment for me. Fear of losing my job, contract, revenue. I still lost it regardless and they won over me that time, and I was left with shame and guilt.
The same shame and guilt I still carry from two decades of weird or bad conversations, for every mental breakdown that I didn’t know to identify or deal with in the moment. The same shame I feel now because no one ever explained to me that a mental breakdown is not only when you have a panic attack or feel suicidal. It’s sometimes when you desperately cling to small interactions to keep yourself sane after living through life-changing events. Like an Instagram chat with someone that doesn’t really know you that well and is ill-equipped to support you, or a boozy night that left you bent down by the subway entrance after thinking to yourself “I’m fine”, with your friend walking away because you were an asshole. You push back on some people that try to help you when you don’t know you need it. Sometimes, that’s the mental breakdown. The one where you convince yourself you are fine when truly, you aren’t.
And years later, you look back on all those moments and you realize how little control you had over your own thoughts, the words you spewed out, and now you feel and carry the guilt and shame of it all. That little weight makes you sometimes question a lot of small things too. An unanswered text message you sent to an old friend, even if there is no reason for it. They were just busy and answered you later. But that moment of silence is trigger enough. Or at least, it was trigger enough for me to write about it right here.
Dragos, are you having a mental breakdown right now? No. I have the luxury to reflect on parts of my life and realize the fragility of our psychology when we thought ourselves strong. Do I regret some of those conversations? Yes. Was that version of me responsible for the words he said? Also yes. Paranoid and scared is an explanation, not an absolution. Sometimes we use anger as a defense mechanism, or reach out to strangers to keep ourselves anchored (which is weird, let’s be honest). But here’s what took me two decades to figure out, remembering it is not the same as serving a sentence for it. I thought the guilt was proof I had learned something. It wasn’t. It was just the breakdown long outliving its lifespan. I can own what I did without replaying it every time an unanswered text sits too long. Doesn’t take away the itch you have in the moment though.
So I wanted to share that a mental breakdown can happen to anyone, and it doesn’t always come with huge life-altering events. Sometimes, it’s the slow erosion of the mental shields we built up over the years that have long since stopped protecting us from a series of unfortunate small events (call it bad luck). And from it all, I simply learned to stop for a bit, breathe for a bit, and not feel guilty for lying down for a bit and doing nothing but recharge. Nor should you.
