The Quiet Collapse

When Self-Awareness Becomes Self-Harm

The Slow Drift

For years I felt myself sliding. Lacking any real sense of direction or purpose, when you don’t know where you’re sailing, no wind is fair.

I have spent most of my adult life abroad, searching for adventure and experience away from the crowds. Quietly satisfying myself with solo pursuits and quiet ambition, shaped not by attention, but by curiosity and contentment.

Silent Ascent

I’d found a niche in a business where I could play a big part while remaining low-key, balancing success with servitude. It was exciting to sense the possibilities that lay ahead, to feel part of something people were proud of.

The Cracks Appear in Perfectionism

But when personal vision began to butt up against demands, something shifted. My abnormally high conscientiousness clashed with a deep desire for autonomy, a pattern I was familiar with. Slowly, the grinding reality of work wore down my aspirations of greatness, polluting them with over-intellectualised, critical negativity. I knew this was bias. On paper, I had it good.

I kept trying to pinpoint the change in myself, but it was a way of thinking that stretched back as far as I could remember, trying to be everything to everyone, but too self-critical and afraid to meet my own expectations.

My ego ideal turned my inner voice hostile, the auto-aggression seeping into everything I did. You could argue it drove me to try harder, but the cost was self-hate of epic proportions.

The Inner Erosion

It became a kind of learned helplessness, an apathy that started to rot my personhood. I didn’t deserve this role; I was a hack. A consummate chameleon. An algorithm that could deliver results without instinct, without the spark of a true creative.

The opposing forces of believing I deserved more and feeling unworthy bred a visceral conflict. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the more I ruminated on it, the more I hollowed out my own sanity.

Corrosion and Withdrawal

Like an anode protecting a ship’s engine, I tried to shield the business with my own degradation. Whether in silence or in meetings, I’d attempt to steer things toward the greater good despite a strong aversion to confrontation. Over time, withdrawal became the safest harbour, and the hull heavy with weed.

My increasingly loud internal monologue was collapsing the scaffolding of self, passing up opportunity and growth for the mediocre comfort of the familiar. Misery loves company.

When you feel you’re no longer at the wheel and heading to someone else’s destination, cutting off your nose to spite your face starts to feel like a legitimate solution.

Righteous and Weak

I’d lost the youthful courage to go my own way, trapped instead in the obligations of senior ranks and expectations and a desire not to repeat patterns of running away. I was facing the wrath of my own indecision.

My values and integrity were at odds with the behaviour around me and I tried to suppress the inner conflict. It is business after all, and not mine at that. I’d always advocated for individuals to work in the way that suited their strengths, accepting that while it wasn’t how I’d do things, it remained a path to their own results.

Over time though, as others’ methods began to affect my own, I wondered why I had to suffer their shortcomings. I had plenty of my own to deal with, and being good at sorting theirs had carved a rut I was stuck in.

When I sensed the corporate machine gearing up to ‘resolve’ things, I took it as an affront. I’d seen these processes rolled out before, and I wasn’t about to be on the receiving end of it.

It’s a humbling thing to feel both righteous and weak. The ego wants to go out guns blazing. The inner child is stricken with grief. The collision of both is messy.

Routine as Armour

Beneath the surface of this unravelling, there was a survival mechanism. The rigour with which I followed routine was militant, an attempt to cope and overcome.

The same nutrient-dense homemade salad for lunch. The same brisk walk. The same non-fiction podcast rotation. The latter designed to educate and drown out the familiar internal slander.

Routine kept the wheels turning, kept me upright, even as everything else listed. It was an attempt at control while the rest of life slipped from my grasp.

The Revolt

It seeded in me a defiance I couldn’t control. I was no longer an inmate — I was ready to go rogue.

Instead of falling in line I stepped out, quite literally, of the building. Mind on fire with outrage, I’d never demanded respect, but I wasn’t about to suffer another moment of others’ misguided self-aggrandisement.

I had, for all intents and purposes, architected my own collapse. And I was about to spiral to depths unseen.

Depersonalisation to the edge

I was a deeply depressed robot, running on auto. Anhedonic. Whose was this body I was inhabiting? Why did I feel like a stranger to myself?

I began to wonder who I was at all, as the running joke of my awful memory made me question what identity even meant without recalled experience.

Who are you, when you forget?

I had reached the point where walking out the door felt like the only honest act left. The last refusal and gesture of agency. But it was no longer a choice.

The collapse was only the beginning. The fall that followed was fast. Ferocious. Absolute.