Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown

Emotional breakdowns require one condition to be interesting. It’s obvious once you see it.

You can click around all you want and get served a list of mental disorders as scout badges. But a collection of disorders won’t work.

Emotional breakdowns need to be vicarious. Furnishing a silhouette, hoping for someone else to find the words you couldn’t. Stand by the words you wouldn’t. How personalized the breakdown may be, so at least we nod to some universal human condition. And then we move on, mostly.

Previously people preserved breakdowns through gossip and shared experience, memory more than anything else, before inevitably fading. Breakdowns weren’t universally documented unless a memoir, an important figure. Some dramatists too, though fiction counts less. Music works, though you’d hope to exalt rather than document.

What’s unique to this era is seeing all the breakdowns documented, plain as day, even infectious. Sorrows of Young Werther amplified, and you’ll stitch yourself rapidly as a race against our deteriorating identities.

So I read emotional breakdowns, but sometimes they feel more like burials. Like crystal gazing, pixels subsumed. To discern a destiny: bibliomancy as the guillotine. Just through a single word alone you can see them — see yourself — enter through their preferred door. Their one-way lock.