How do you keep going after something breaks you?

The short answer: **you do not wait to be repaired before continuing.** The sequence people expect — heal, then resume — is not how it runs. You resume damaged, badly, at a fraction of your former capacity, and the capacity returns as a consequence of the resuming rather than as its precondition.

That is not an inspiring answer. It is the accurate one, and accuracy is more use here than encouragement.

The wound does not have to close

The dominant picture is medical: an injury, a healing period, a return to normal. It fits some things and not the large ones. Some damage does not close. You do not get the previous version back, and waiting for it is waiting for a train that was cancelled.

What changes is not the size of the thing. It is how much of your daily bandwidth it occupies — and that reduces through use of the bandwidth for other purposes, which is another way of saying: through living alongside it.

Why "take all the time you need" is dangerous advice

It is kindly meant and true for about the first stretch, whose length nobody can specify. After that it becomes a reason not to start, and not starting has its own compounding cost — a shrinking world, fewer contacts, less evidence that anything is possible, which makes starting harder, which extends the not-starting.

There is no formula for when the first stretch ends. The signal to watch for is: are you resting, or have you stopped? Resting has a texture of relief in it. Stopping has a texture of dread, and dread does not respond to more time.

Function before feeling

The thing that reliably moves first is not mood. It is function — and function can be resumed while feeling nothing at all about it.

Get up at a fixed time. Eat something at intervals. Go outside once. Do one piece of work badly. None of it is meaningful and none of it is supposed to feel like anything. It is scaffolding, and scaffolding is not the building; it is what lets the building be worked on.

The feeling follows, later, unannounced, and usually cannot be traced to any particular day.

What other people get wrong

They want a resolution, because an unresolved thing in somebody they care about is uncomfortable to sit beside. So they ask whether you are better, and the question is hard to answer honestly without disappointing them.

You are allowed to not be better. You are allowed to say "I am functioning, and it is still there." The people who can hear that are the ones worth telling things to, and you will find out quite quickly who they are.

Where this is in the book

There is a scene in chapter two called *The Wound That Does Not Stop Him*. The title is the argument.

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*If you are struggling with something serious, this essay is not a substitute for talking to somebody. It is worth telling one real person, and a professional if you can reach one.*