Mental Breakdowns, Psychoanalyzed

What I learned about repressed emotions

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. — Siggy Freud

There’s something chic about tears — hot, glutinous, and opalescent, the kind shed by lovers and poets. It’s like your face is releasing all the exhaust of the machinery working behind it, calibrating all those incongruent personalities and little shards of obsessions, disappointments, and regrets…until it cracks.

Me last Friday

We’re very good at keeping going, and so we keep going until we break. You see, a breakdown is just a breakthrough in progress. A mental breakdown is the mind saying, “please take a look at what’s beneath your emotional epidermis.”

The reason why things break is because they’re not flexible, and flexibility is a strength in many ways:

• A flexible body feels less pain and has a lower risk of injury

• A flexible calendar absorbs more opportunities

• A flexible mind recovers from guilt and blame faster

• A flexible personality makes friends more easily

• A flexible voice sings a greater range

• So on

You break down because you haven’t flexed enough over the years. A mental breakdown doesn’t mean you became ill; it means you were already ill.

We pathologize breakdowns because they’re inconvenient. We’re quick to remove the person from the scene and not talk about them so that business can resume as usual. But a breakdown isn’t madness or malfunction — and it certainly isn’t random — it’s a real bid for self-knowledge.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago. — F. Nietzsche

Now a little personal update: