When You Feel Like You’re Falling: The Truth About Emotional Collapse

We are told to rise. To keep climbing, building, expanding toward clarity, toward healing, toward some final sense of being whole. But for some of us, the path never felt linear. It spirals. It loops. We rise, then dip. Illuminate, then dissolve.

And in this culture of constant ascent, that dissolution has been mislabeled as dysfunction.

We call it depression. Instability. Resistance. We say we're "stuck" or “losing momentum” when the motion simply isn’t forward anymore. But what if the collapse isn’t a problem? What if it’s part of the choreography?

I’ve been in it recently. That place. The lull. The floating. Where the spark feels dull and my energy won’t rally, no matter how many to-do lists I write. I used to panic when this happened. I’d call it failure. I’d wonder if I’d lost whatever magic made me clear, impactful, awake.

But this time, I did something different.
I let it happen.
I stopped trying to rise.

I didn’t try to launch a new project. I didn’t force clarity. I didn’t fix. I walked slowly through the old paths at Horsetooth and let the wind move around me. I let myself be a watcher, a listener. A stone rather than a torch.

And it was in that stillness that I remembered:
My descent isn’t a regression.
It’s a recalibration.

Some of us are not meant to move like arrows. We are built more like tides, storms, cycles. We don’t unfold in a straight line we unfold in spirals. And that means collapse isn’t the opposite of progress. It’s how we breathe.

The mind hates this, of course. The ego wants clarity, answers, visibility. It wants a brand, a plan, a neat little box to keep things moving. But the body? The body knows something older. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t need to prove. It rides the wave down just as it rides it up.

I used to think the low tide meant I was broken.
Now I know it’s where I deepen.

So if you’re in it right now if you’re floating in the nothingness, if your fire feels far away, if the spark has quieted don’t panic. Don’t label it. Don’t outrun it.

Sit with it.
Let yourself be still.
Let yourself be bored.

Because that boredom, that silence, that weird dead space you think you have to get out of? That’s where the truth starts to hum again. That’s where your coherence begins to reassemble on its own time, in its own rhythm, without being forced.

I’m not here to tell you to rise.
I’m here to tell you: the fall is holy, too.