“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Hemingway was talking about money, but he could’ve been describing almost anything that falls apart—our health, our relationships, our sobriety, even our identity. Collapse is rarely abrupt. Usually, it’s a slow unraveling we tolerate, excuse, and ignore—until we can’t.
We all do this, in one form or another. We normalize the drift. We tell ourselves next week will be different, tomorrow we will make a different choice. We downplay the fatigue, the stress, the disconnection—until something breaks.
When it does, it tends to break in one of two ways:
Some crises come from within, when we reach a moment inside that our pain or discomfort finally outweighs our resistance. These kinds of crises are the point where the accumulation becomes too much to carry. Although the external circumstances from yesterday are similar, the feeling inside has become untenable. The imperative to change moves from someday to now. Once we’ve gotten here though, the work of rebuilding begins from a much deeper hole, and the road forward is steeper.
In addiction, this change is often called “rock bottom.” The point at which we decide to change is subjective though, because it can always get worse. What we call bottom is just the point where we can’t do it anymore. I’ve seen lives fall apart in every possible way, yet even then, real willingness to change doesn’t always follow. I’ve also seen people enter recovery before too much damage has been done.
Other crises come from the outside. A heart attack. A job loss. An overdose. A divorce. These tend to be beyond the realm of what we can control. We can tell ourselves the lie that everything is fine, but we cannot change the math of our bank account. External crises can be rationalized: He left because he has issues. I got fired because of the economy. It was just one bad night. Sometimes, these things are the trigger we need to finally confront the things we’ve been minimizing, jolting us into action. Other times though, the rationalizations continue; we might change, but only the minimum amount required to accommodate our new reality. We miss the deeper signal that something has been wrong for a long time, and the collapse was only the final symptom. Maybe the spending can’t continue because there’s no money left—but instead of examining how spending became a coping mechanism, we make the smallest budget cuts needed to stay afloat.
But we don’t need to wait for either a spiritual crisis or a medical crisis. So how do we intervene before bankruptcy, the heart attack, the divorce? How do we stop the gradual slide before it becomes a crash?
First, we must pay attention to the drift. We need to stop ignoring the signs we usually dismiss, justify, or rationalize: fatigue that doesn’t go away, irritability in our relationships, small but mounting financial stress, a growing reliance on numbing habits. These are signals, not background noise. These are the things we need to tune into. Listening to them helps us find the way.
Second, we must practice honesty with ourselves. Are we tolerating something we shouldn’t? Are we pretending not to see what we see? Are we telling ourselves stories to justify inertia? We don’t need to be brutal with ourselves to be honest. In fact, being brutal is not helpful. These things are already painful to look at, so if we want to see them clearly, we must learn to approach them with kindness and compassion.
Finally, we must be willing to act before the emergency. This sounds simple, but many of us resist change even when the warning lights are flashing. We normalize discomfort. We tell ourselves that next week will be different. We hesitate because we don’t know where to start, or we’re afraid of the discomfort that change will bring. We cling to what’s familiar—even if it’s slowly killing us—because at least we know it. And if we’ve already poured years into a job, a relationship, a pattern, we’re haunted by the sense that changing course would mean wasting all that effort. So we keep going, quietly losing ground.
Sometimes we don’t act because we’re tired. Life is full, and change demands energy we feel like we don’t have. Other times, we wait for permission—from a friend, a doctor, a boss—because no one else seems concerned, and we doubt our own instincts. And then there’s the deeper layer: shame. We feel like we’ve failed by ending up here in the first place, so we freeze instead of reaching out.
But none of these barriers are permanent. We can work through any of them. That might mean asking for help, it might mean making the call, setting the boundary, changing the habit—before we feel “ready.” Change doesn’t need a crisis. It just needs a decision.
If something cannot go on forever, it wont. Eventually, we’ll reach the crisis, the tipping point, the catastrophe, and change will become inevitable. But this kind of forced change often involves chaos and tragedy. We can’t avoid all suffering, but we can avoid some of it. We don’t have to crash. We can catch ourselves on the way down.
Gradually, then suddenly—that’s how many things fall apart. But it’s also how they come back together.
Cheers,
Doc