This piece touches on despair, self-destruction, and addiction. If you’re in immediate danger or thinking about harming yourself, please contact local emergency services right now. (In the Canada you can Text 988 or Text CONNECT to 686868)
There is a quiet art to falling apart. It starts small — a missed appointment, a promise whispered to yourself and left unkept — and then the world rearranges itself around the empty space you left behind. People notice. Some don’t. But you know. You feel the surrender in your bones: the slow letting go of who you were, who you hoped to be, and all the soft mercies you owed yourself.
I call it my demise because it sounds honest and dramatic when the truth is messy and ordinary. It’s not necessarily a war-ending catastrophe with sirens and finality. Sometimes it looks like the same tired song on repeat, an ache that slips into mornings and lingers into nights. It’s surrender by degrees — to old habits, louder fears, the voice that tells you you’re beyond saving. And yet, within that collapse, there are quiet seams of something else: recognition, memory, and a stubborn kind of survival.
When you’re inside your own demise, it’s hard to speak plainly. You feel like a failure before the first failure has even finished forming. You ask yourself over and over — how did I get here? How did the love I once had for my life shrink until I could carry it in one hand and the rest of me in the other?
Addiction, grief, mistakes, trauma — they are all skilled architects of demise. They build rooms you can’t find the door to. They plant mirrors that reflect not truth but accusation. They tell you that if you can’t control it, you don’t deserve it. But the truth I’ve learned — painfully, in therapy sessions and in sleepless nights and in mornings that forced me to rise anyway — is that the presence of these things does not erase your humanity. It underscores it.
Part of surviving a demise is naming it. Call it fear. Call it relapse. Call it the day you stopped answering your own questions. Naming is not a verdict; it’s a map. Once you name the thing, you can start to see where it sits in your life and what trails might lead away. It doesn’t have to be heroic. It can be a tiny choice — to open a window, to text someone who cares, to make coffee and not drown it in sugar just to feel something other than numbness.
There are practical things that helped me when my collapse felt inevitable: small routines that anchored a day (a shower, sunlight, a single healthy bite), telling one person the truth even when it felt embarrassing, and setting tiny, recoverable goals. Therapy taught me that the inner critic is not the boss; it just has a loud voice. Community reminded me that I was not alone in the fall. Parenting — if you’ve carried children through your storms — taught me that love persists even when you falter. Your love for someone else can be the bridge back to your own care.
But tenderness must meet action. Compassion without boundaries becomes permission to stay stuck. Structure without compassion becomes cruel. So balance looks like this: gentle honesty about the damage, and fierce, practical plans to begin repair. It looks like asking for help and accepting it. It looks like small, repeatable acts of care that slowly rewrite who you are to yourself.
If you’re reading this and recognizing your own demise, I want to say something: it’s not the end. Not if you pull toward help, not if you find one small action and make it yours. Recovery is messy; it is not linear. You will trip. You will grieve. You will mourn the person you were and sometimes rage at the person you are. That rage is fair. Use it to fuel a change, not to punish yourself.
Finally — and perhaps most importantly — allow hope to be mundane. Hope doesn’t always roar. It sometimes shows up as a quiet morning, a neighbor’s smile, a therapist who listens without fixing you. Hope is the stubborn light that says, “Try one more day.” Try it. Try it for the person you used to be and for the person you could still become.
If you want, share your story here. Tell me what your demise looks like — I will listen without judgment. If you need immediate help, please contact local emergency services or a crisis line. You do not have to navigate this alone.
Bigmommaj
#MentalHealth #Suicide #survival
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