Where Are You on the Ledge?

Hey there, ledge walkers. How are you today?

I’ve been thinking about rock bottom again, although I’m beginning to realize that maybe I’ve been using the wrong words for what happens after it.

We tend to talk about rock bottom as though it is a single place. Everything falls apart, you hit bottom, you lie there for a while, then eventually you get up and start climbing. Down, bottom, up. Nice clean little diagram.

Life, unfortunately, does not seem terribly interested in nice clean diagrams.

When I started Standing on the Ledge, I thought I had a pretty good idea what rock bottom looked like. The business was gone. Money was a mess. There were lawyers, bills, uncertainty, anger and that wonderful experience of waking up every day wondering which problem wanted attention first. There wasn’t much room for philosophy at the beginning. When enough things are on fire, you don’t stand there contemplating the nature of fire. You grab whatever bucket is closest.

So I did what people do. I started dealing with things.

Find work. Make the phone calls. Deal with the bills. Talk to the lawyer. Figure out what can be paid now and what has to wait. Keep food in the house. Keep going to work. Get through today, then worry about tomorrow when tomorrow actually arrives.

Somewhere along the way, little systems started appearing around the chaos. Budgets. Lists. Appointments. Routines. Plans. Not exciting stuff, but useful stuff. Eventually that became part of how I started thinking about the different phases of Standing on the Ledge.

There is prevention, when something is going wrong but the structure hasn’t collapsed yet. There is impact, when something finally gives way. Then triage, when the objective is simply to stop things from getting worse. After that comes rebuilding systems, when some structure begins returning to your life. Eventually, hopefully, comes gaining territory, when you aren’t merely trying to survive anymore but are actually beginning to move forward.

I still think that model works.

What I am beginning to understand is that moving forward doesn’t necessarily mean the ground ahead becomes smooth.

Maybe what I have been tempted to call another rock bottom isn’t another bottom at all.

Maybe it is a crevice after the first plateau.

The First Plateau

You climb for a while after everything falls apart and eventually you reach somewhere relatively solid. You’re not at the top of anything. You’re probably nowhere close. But you’re also not free-falling anymore.

You can breathe.

You have income again. Some bills are getting handled. The immediate emergencies have stopped arriving quite so quickly. You have enough stability that your entire existence isn’t organized around whatever is screaming the loudest that particular day.

That is a kind of plateau.

And maybe one of the strange things about finally reaching relatively solid ground is that you can start walking around again.

That’s when you discover the cracks.

Some of them were probably always there. You just couldn’t see them while you were climbing.

Lately I’ve been bumping into one of those cracks.

Things happening around me have been stirring up feelings and patterns that are uncomfortably familiar. I’ve written recently about realizing that parts of my present situation resemble the final stretch of my marriage. I’ve written about frustration, about getting tired of waiting for things to change, about reaching that point where sometimes you want to take a metaphorical sledgehammer to something because asking nicely doesn’t seem to be accomplishing much.

At first, those things looked like separate annoyances.

This happened. That irritated me. Somebody didn’t do something. Something still isn’t getting done. Another responsibility landed on the pile.

But if you put enough apparently unrelated frustrations beside each other, sometimes a pattern appears.

And that’s when the question changes.

It stops being, How do I deal with today’s problem?

It becomes, Why am I rebuilding a life that contains some of the same things I already know I was miserable living with before?

That’s not another rock bottom.

That’s a crevice.

A Crevice Doesn’t Erase the Climb

I think the distinction matters.

Falling into a crevice does not mean you have somehow teleported back to the bottom of the mountain. It doesn’t erase the climbing you’ve already done. It doesn’t mean all the work was pointless. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

It means the terrain ahead is more complicated than it looked from below.

I’m not where I was when this journey began. I’m working. I’m dealing with the legal mess. I’m paying attention to money. I’ve built routines and systems that didn’t exist when everything first came apart. Some things are more stable than they were. Some things are actually better.

I’ve gained ground.

But gaining ground has given me enough breathing room to notice things that survival didn’t leave much room to examine.

There are old patterns here.

There are responsibilities I’ve continued carrying without really asking why. There are things I keep fixing because somebody has to fix them. There are frustrations I’ve been treating as isolated problems that, viewed together, may be pointing toward something larger.

And there are parts of this rebuilt life that are beginning to resemble parts of an older life I already know I didn’t want.

That deserves attention.

Survival Can Become a Habit

One of the things I think happens during a prolonged crisis is that you become extremely good at solving problems.

You have to.

Something goes sideways and you deal with it. Somebody drops a ball and you pick it up. Money gets tight and you rearrange things. Work needs something and you make it happen. Something breaks and you fix it. Something needs doing and eventually you stop asking who should be doing it and simply do it yourself.

There is something useful in becoming capable like that. There should be. You learn things about yourself when you discover that you can keep moving through circumstances you once thought would flatten you.

But capability can become a trap.

If you get good enough at compensating for broken systems, broken arrangements or somebody else’s lack of effort, the broken thing can continue functioning indefinitely.

Because you’re holding it up.

At some point you have to ask whether you are actually rebuilding something or merely becoming better at maintaining what is already exhausting you.

That is one of the cracks I couldn’t really see from the bottom.

Where Are You on the Ledge?

This is where I still find the phase idea useful, as long as we remember that these phases are landmarks, not rules.

You don’t finish Phase 2 on Tuesday and report for Phase 3 Wednesday morning. Human beings aren’t project plans.

You can be rebuilding financially while emotionally still standing in the impact zone. You can be gaining ground at work while your home life remains stuck in triage. You can make enormous progress in one area and discover something completely unresolved in another.

So maybe the better question isn’t, Have I recovered?

Maybe it is simply: Where am I on the ledge right now?

Maybe you’re still in prevention. Something isn’t right, but nothing has collapsed yet. If that is where you are, pay attention. That stage is usually much easier to recognize in hindsight because human beings can explain away an astonishing amount of unhappiness with the words, It’ll get better.

Maybe you’re in impact. Something has just happened and you haven’t even figured out which way is up yet. That isn’t the time for somebody to hand you a motivational poster. Sometimes the accomplishment really is getting through the day.

Maybe you’re in triage. You’re juggling money, work, family, health or whatever else landed on you, and success right now means nothing became dramatically worse this week. Fair enough. Survival counts.

Maybe you’re rebuilding systems. You’re putting structure back around your life. You’re beginning to see daylight between emergencies rather than simply moving from one disaster to another.

Or maybe you’ve reached a plateau.

Things have become stable enough that you can finally look around.

And that’s when you see the crevice.

The Problem You Couldn’t See While Climbing

That may actually be a form of progress, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

When the building is burning, nobody spends much time discussing the floor plan. You get out.

Once the fire is extinguished, you’re allowed to stand there, look back at what remains and ask whether you actually want to rebuild the exact same house.

Maybe you don’t.

Maybe some walls shouldn’t go back up.

Maybe some rooms don’t need to exist anymore.

Maybe something that has always been part of the house was part of the problem.

Maybe some people who were perfectly comfortable with the old floor plan aren’t going to like the renovations.

And maybe that is okay.

I don’t have a grand solution here. I’m standing in the middle of this myself, and that’s rather the point of Standing on the Ledge. I’m not writing from some mountaintop explaining how I conquered everything. Half the time I’m writing because I’ve just tripped over another piece of the damned mountain and I’m trying to figure out what it is.

So I’m certainly not suggesting that anybody burn their life down because they’re frustrated on a Friday afternoon.

I’m suggesting something smaller.

Look around at the life you have been maintaining.

Look at the routines, responsibilities, expectations, relationships, compromises and things you keep fixing. Look at the things you accepted during the emergency because there wasn’t time or energy to question them.

Then ask yourself:

If I weren’t in survival mode anymore, would I still choose this?

I suspect that question may tell us more about where we are on the ledge than any numbered phase ever could.

Maybe Progress Just Changes the Terrain

For me, that’s where this journey seems to be heading next.

The original crisis isn’t the same crisis anymore. A lot has changed. Some things are better. Some things remain unresolved. I’ve gained territory in some places and discovered problems in others.

But I don’t think I’ve hit another rock bottom.

I think I climbed far enough to reach the first plateau, started walking across relatively solid ground again and discovered a crevice I couldn’t see while I was fighting my way upward.

And maybe that’s an important distinction.

Progress doesn’t mean the terrain becomes flat.

It means you’re encountering new terrain.

Sometimes the view from a new ledge shows you how far you’ve come. Sometimes it shows you how far you still have to go. Sometimes it reveals a crack in the ground that wasn’t visible from where you started.

You may have to stop. You may have to backtrack a little. You may have to find another route. You may even discover that you’ve been climbing the wrong damned wall.