It’s fascinating to see a human being self destruct; especially when you are looking in the mirror and the person you see self destruct is you. It becomes an obsession, you stare and stare, feeling that there has to be something you need to do something, you have to do but you can not move a muscle. For the life of you, you become a spectator in your own funeral procession. Burnout was a new word, every one was going through it, high profile executives in every field were going through it. At 25 he was one, most people went thru it after they finished their MBAs and have worked for a few years helping multinational corporations go places and then they have a spectacular blowout, He burnt out in the middle of his MBA there were days when he was afraid to sleep in the night and times when looking in the mirror was painful. Diagnosed with clinical depression he had blown a potentially rewarding education and career with nothing to look forward to.
His family was distraught and his friends were disappointed, and there were days when he wanted to kill him self, but even there he was caught between the argument that it was very cowardly or very brave taking his own life. Some days he thought it would be brave of him giving up his life, and shield his family and loved ones from the trauma his life had become. On other days it felt cowardly because it was taking the easy way out and living the rest of the world to deal with the ordeal. Anti depressants weren’t much help either, because for them to work the stress would have to go away and for some reason it came up in every conversation, secondly it drained the life from a person and there was no energy to do any thing.
Life gets complicated from time to time. Today he heard the two people he loves the most argue about money. They were people he gave examples of when asked what the ideal marriage should be like. Today they argued over the amount of money they were spending over each other, the current argument was the fallout of another one that as usual had started over his burnout or failure and spilled over into their personal lives, he had poisoned the love between two of the people he cared for the most. Love that gave hope to them and carried them through enough trouble to make most couples look mediocre and now a stupid little metal breakdown looked to tear them apart. Life never did play fair.
The funny thing is he never wished he could rewind life, or redo it all over again, but some times it just feels like it would just be better with a pause button or better yet, push a button and erase your entire past. The past is like an inebriated ghost who wouldn’t let me sleep and neither would it let me put it to rest. He would work himself to into exhaustion so that he could get a few precious hours of sleep, but since he had over heard the argument between them he couldn’t sleep it had been two days he would lie awake at nights and sit in front of the television like a zombie. He had been trying to patch together the pieces of his life for the last few years and it was ridiculous how every thing he had done against so much opposition and heartache could be undone by a silly argument between two people. Relationships can be one person’s strength and their biggest weakness as well.
Labels: breakdown