A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown - day 15

Listen to me reading this

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(I skipped day 13 and day 14.) People ask about the trigger, or triggers. A singular moment, a specific wound, betrayal or failure I can point to and say, “There. That was the thing that broke me.”

As someone who loves to know how everything works, I understand the impulse to search for a manageable cause: something we can isolate, understand, and guard against. But asking about triggers is like asking which single note makes a song sad, or which wave was responsible for a flood.

Instead of trying to trace my way back down into that darkness, I might ask you something.

If you’re lucky enough not to feel miserable today – if the nasty internal voice, for now, is quiet – how do you explain that? Did something “trigger” your general okayness? Does the notion of a trigger, even, really help?

I’m guessing it might be more useful to look instead at a larger structure – the architecture of your life. What holds you up?

It might include the texture of your morning. Reliable rituals, the way light falls in your kitchen before the rest of the house wakes up. A person who you can talk to (or sit in silence with). A job, or other responsibility that depends, specifically, on you. Physical sensations – exhaustion after a good workout, and the simple, underrated miracle of a good night’s sleep. And a sense of the future: a trip you’re planning, book you look forward to reading, or something else that makes the horizon feel open rather than closed.

Or perhaps your happy architecture includes the blessing of an absence: the absence of a specific anxiety, a person who drains you, or financial stress.

These “reasons for happiness”, if they go missing or become compromised, can leave a person exposed.

When I look back, I do see a few traumatic events, including bereavement and loss of work. But there was also slow erosion. Rituals disappeared, and friendships were neglected. The physical foundation of sleep and regular exercise crumbled. And the sense of a future shrank to almost nothing.

In the last couple of days I’ve been laying the cutout photos I told you about all over my living room floor.

Peanut, my dog, has made occasional disruptive incursions by wading through it all and lying down wherever she likes – but she hasn’t, happily, tried to chew anything.

When I lay out pictures and pages on the floor, I’m looking at the flow, the rhythm, the beats of my “story”, such as it is.

In many ways there’s no story, just a succession of events. Which made me rethink.

Back then, in the midst of it all, I became convinced that I was a man with nothing to him, nothing in him, a worthless blank. With hindsight I can see that I brought into the hospital many things that would help to save me. I’m particularly thinking of insights I’d picked up from people I’d met as a journalist and as a theatrical improviser.

I’m working now on how to bring those into the book, so that they seem earned, and organic.

Copies of this one-off book are still available. If you know someone who might want one, or just find this project interesting, feel free to pass this along.

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👉 If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to a crisis line in your country. In the UK, Samaritans are available any time on 116 123.

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