032 the breakdown before the breakthrough

There are moments in life when everything you’ve been trying to hold together—your routines, your relationships, your job, your sense of self—suddenly unravels. Quietly or catastrophically. Sometimes even both. And in that unraveling, something shifts internally. Not necessarily clarity, but a reckoning.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about breakdowns, sometimes my own (yes, I’m still human), and what has emerged from them. The kind of breakdowns that feel like emotional free-falls. When the ground gives out, your knees buckle, and you’re left suspended in uncertainty. It can feel deeply disorienting and hopeless. You start to wonder: is this the moment everything I’ve worked for falls apart? Or, if we shift the perspective, could this be what it looks like right before something new begins?

In therapy sessions, I often revisit the idea of character with my clients. Not the polished version shaped by accomplishments, and not even the raw, honest version that reveals itself when life gets hard, but the part that shows up in the mess. The part that emerges when you're exhausted, overwhelmed, scared, and unsure of what comes next. It’s not about how we perform under pressure, but how we relate to ourselves in those moments.

It’s the days you don’t recognize yourself or anyone around you. The nights you cry yourself to sleep but still manage to show up the next morning. That is character. It’s in the small, quiet choices no one sees. The decision to keep going, even when everything inside you tells you to stay in bed.

Hardship has a way of stripping away everything extra. It doesn’t demand perfection, just honesty. Sometimes it asks us to stay when it would be easier to walk away, to feel instead of numbing. Sometimes we meet that ask. Sometimes we don’t. We break down, we avoid, we fall apart. That doesn’t mean we’ve failed. It means we’re human. And we can hold space for both: for moments of strength and moments of collapse. Neither defines us entirely.

In mythology, the phoenix rising from the fire is often used to symbolize transformation through hardship. It’s easy to romanticize the rising, but we rarely acknowledge the importance of the fire, the burning. That’s where the real transformation happens. The fire is fear, grief, loss. It’s the letting go of who you thought you had to be and stepping into who you’re becoming.

Eventually, we all reach a point where we have to ask ourselves: are we going to sit in the ashes of this moment or rise from it?

Breakdowns aren’t glamorous. They’re humbling, terrifying, and often lonely. But they carry the potential for profound transformation, the kind that leads you closer to your most honest, authentic self. Once everything else is stripped away, what remains is the part of you that survives the fire.

And maybe the breakdown isn’t the end of the story. Maybe it’s the beginning of your most honest chapter yet.