Climbing from the bottom

THE RETURN FROM BELOW

There’s a point where the mind drops too far inward.

Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just a shift — a slide — and suddenly everything feels distant and muted. Thought gets heavy. The body feels far away. Time stops behaving normally.

I know that place.

It’s not mystical. It’s not meaningful. It’s just a depth where functioning becomes harder and everything slows down. When I’m in it, I don’t think about getting out. I don’t think about anything. It’s suspension, not crisis.

What breaks it is always something small.

A physical detail.

A sensation.

Something external enough to interrupt the drift.

My hand on a table.

My breath falling back into rhythm.

A sound I didn’t realize I was ignoring.

It’s not an epiphany.

It’s not healing.

It’s just a fact that cuts through the fog:

I’m still here.

Coming back isn’t a dramatic climb.

It’s a sequence of basic actions that feel almost mechanical:

Sit up.

Breathe.

Touch something solid.

Re-enter the room.

I don’t come back because I feel better.

I come back because staying down there isn’t an option.

Every return teaches the same thing:

The mind can pull you under, but it doesn’t get the final say.

There’s always a way back to the surface, even if it’s slow, even if it’s clumsy, even if nothing is solved.

I leave the depth behind without explaining it.

I don’t owe it meaning.

I choose to return.

THE RETURN TO FUNCTION

Coming back doesn’t look like recovery.

It looks like resuming tasks.

I don’t announce anything.

I don’t explain where I went.

I start moving again — slow, automatic, efficient enough to pass.

People read that as stability.

It isn’t.

It’s maintenance.

There’s a version of me that handles the surface-level requirements:

The messages, the dishes, the appointments, the small talk.

She’s practiced. She knows the script.

She can operate even when the rest of me is still lagging.

It’s not a mask in the emotional sense.

It’s a mask in the functional sense —

a system that keeps the day from collapsing while the mind recalibrates.

I don’t resent it.

It’s just how the machinery works.

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THE PATTERN

There’s a sequence to all of this.

Not predictable, but familiar enough that I can map it.

The drop.

The suspension.

The interruption.

The return.

The mask.

It repeats in different shapes, but the structure stays the same.

I’ve stopped pretending it’s random.

I can feel the early signs now — the way my thoughts start to flatten, the way the world loses depth, the way my body becomes something I observe instead of inhabit. None of it surprises me anymore.

Knowing the pattern doesn’t stop it.

It just means I don’t waste energy being confused.

This is the system.

This is the cycle.

This is the cost of having a mind that goes too deep, too fast, without warning.

But if there’s a pattern, there’s also a path out.

And I follow it every time, even when I don’t feel like I’m choosing it.

The descent is involuntary.

The return is not.

THE COST

The cost is not dramatic.

It’s subtle, cumulative, and predictable.

Every descent takes something.

Not in a catastrophic sense — nothing explodes, nothing collapses — but in the quiet, measurable ways that add up over time.

The first cost is time.

Hours disappear.

Not because I’m doing anything, but because I’m not.

The world keeps moving while I’m suspended somewhere beneath it, and when I come back, I’m already behind.

Then there’s focus.

It doesn’t snap back immediately.

It drags.

It stutters.

Tasks stretch.

Decisions slow.

I reread the same sentence three times before it sticks.

People assume I’m tired or distracted.

They don’t understand that I’m not drifting — I’m recalibrating.

The cost shows up in relationships too.

I’m present, but delayed.

I respond, but not fully.

I look fine, so people assume I am.

That assumption is its own cost.

There’s also the physical residue.

My jaw stays tight.

My shoulders lock.

My breath stays shallow for hours after resurfacing.

None of this is dramatic enough to be called damage.

It’s erosion.

A slow wearing-down of bandwidth, patience, and clarity.

And I’ve learned to factor that erosion into the way I move through the world.

HOW I LEARNED TO LIVE WITH IT

I didn’t learn to live with this because I wanted to.

I learned because the alternative was pretending it wasn’t happening.

The first shift was acceptance.

Not emotional acceptance.

Practical acceptance.

This is how my mind works.

This is the pattern.

This is the cycle.

Once I stopped treating the descent like a personal failure, I could actually manage it.

I learned the early signs.

The flattening.

The narrowing.

The distance.

The dissociation from my own body.

Recognizing the pattern didn’t stop it, but it gave me orientation.

I also learned that the return is a procedure.

A sequence I can execute even when I feel nothing:

Sit up.

Breathe.

Touch something solid.

Name one fact.

Move one part of my body.

Re-enter the room.

It’s not healing.

It’s stabilization.

I built my life around the cycle instead of against it.

Modular tasks.

Flexible routines.

Space for interruption.

No punishment for needing to reset.

I separated function from wellness.

The mask is not a deception.

It’s infrastructure.

And I stopped explaining myself.

The cycle is internal.

The management is mine.

The meaning belongs to me alone.

I don’t glorify it.

I don’t dramatize it.

I don’t hate it.

I live with it.

And I live despite it.

THE BOUNDARIES

Eventually, you stop negotiating with the cycle.

You start drawing lines.

The first boundary:

I don’t sacrifice stability for anyone else’s comfort.

If I need space, I take it.

If I need silence, I keep it.

If I need to step away, I don’t explain why.

People who require justification don’t get access.

The second boundary:

I don’t perform wellness.

Functioning is enough.

Quiet is allowed.

Slowness is not a problem to fix.

The third boundary:

I don’t let anyone define what my mind should look like from the outside.

People love to interpret what they don’t understand.

I don’t correct them.

I don’t educate them.

I don’t hand over the narrative.

My mind is not a public project.

The final boundary:

I refuse to abandon myself just because the descent feels easier than the return.

The depths are familiar.

The surface requires effort.

I chose the surface anyway.

THE RECALIBRATION

Coming back isn’t the end of the cycle.

It’s the beginning of recalibration.

The return gets me out of the depths.

Recalibration gets me functional again.

It starts with orientation.

Where am I?

What time is it?

What needs attention?

What can wait?

Then reorganization.

Tasks are sorted into urgent, necessary, optional, and irrelevant.

Most things fall into the last two categories.

Recalibration requires honesty about capacity.

Not imagined capacity — actual capacity.

I rebuild in increments.

One task.

One conversation.

One decision.

One hour at a time.

I let the residue fade instead of fighting it.

The heaviness.

The static.

The delay.

It all passes faster when I stop treating it like a malfunction.

Recalibration is not recovery.

It’s maintenance.

It’s how I keep the cycle from taking more than it already does.

The descent may be involuntary.

The recalibration is mine.