What do you do when the thing you asked for actually arrives?
Not the version you pictured. Not the neat, cinematic version where change slides in gently and rearranges your life into something better while you sleep. I mean the real one. The one that doesn't negotiate. The one that takes the long way through everything you've built before it hands you anything back.
I had spent years asking for change, quietly, in the way you ask for things you're not sure you actually want. I told myself I meant it. I did the reading, the reflection, the small deliberate choices that are supposed to steer a life somewhere better. What I didn't understand, not really, was that change rarely announces itself in advance. It doesn't send a schedule. It doesn't ask whether you're ready. It simply arrives, and by the time you recognise it for what it is, you're already standing in the middle of it.
When Everything Fell Away at Once
During lockdown, my whole world came apart at once. Career, gone. The social rhythm that had quietly been holding me together, gone. The small freedoms I hadn't noticed I was leaning on, until the day they weren't there anymore. Streets that used to carry the ordinary noise of other people's lives went silent, and that silence had a way of getting inside you if you sat with it too long. There was nowhere to go and nothing to distract from what was actually happening underneath the surface of my own mind.
And underneath all of it, my own mind, the one thing I had always trusted to stay familiar even when everything else was uncertain, began to feel like a room I no longer recognised. I would sit with thoughts that weren't new exactly, but that had never been given room to breathe before, and without the usual noise of work and routine and other people's expectations, there was nothing left to drown them out.
There's a name for what I went through. Some call it a dark night of the soul. Others call it ego dissolution. Neither phrase captures what it actually felt like from the inside, which was less like breaking and more like two forces colliding at once. Everything was imploding, collapsing toward some centre I couldn't locate. And everything was expanding, at the very same moment, stretching past every edge I had once used to define myself. I didn't have language for that combination while it was happening. I'm not certain I fully have it now. The closest I can get is this: it felt like standing at the exact center of a storm and a stillness, both true, both happening to the same body, at the same time.
The Cost Nobody Warns You About
Here's the part that still catches me, even years later. I had asked for this.
Not this, specifically. Nobody asks for the collapse. But I had asked for change. I had done what you're supposed to do: the work, the reflection, the small deliberate choices meant to steer a life toward something better. What nobody tells you is that change doesn't always arrive as improvement first. Sometimes it arrives as demolition. It clears the site before it builds anything, and it never asks permission about the order of operations. Nobody hands you a timeline either. There's no way to know, in the middle of it, whether you're two weeks from the bottom or two years.
I wasn't ready for what that cost actually meant. I don't think anyone can be, not really. You can read about it, listen to others describe their own versions of it, nod along as though you understand. I had certainly read enough books, heard enough stories, to believe I understood what other people meant when they talked about hitting bottom. But understanding a thing intellectually and living inside it are two entirely different experiences. Until your own floor gives way, you have no idea what waits underneath it, or whether you'll recognise yourself once you land.
There were days I didn't. Days where the person looking back from the mirror felt like a stranger wearing my face, going through motions that used to feel automatic and now took deliberate, exhausting effort.
What Was Left
I didn't have a camera in my hands during the worst of it. I wasn't thinking about art. I was just trying to hold myself together from one hour to the next, and some days that was the entire scope of my ambition: get through this hour, then the next one.
But somewhere inside that unraveling, something quietly began to shift, in how I saw the world outside my window: the light, the stillness, the way one ordinary scene could suddenly carry more weight than it had any right to. A tree I had walked past a hundred times without noticing would stop me completely. A particular slant of afternoon light across an empty room would hold my attention in a way I couldn't explain and didn't try to. I didn't know it yet, but that shift, small and almost accidental, was the beginning of everything I make now.
I don't have a tidy ending for this part of the story, and I won't pretend the collapse resolved into wisdom on some clean schedule, because it didn't. What I can tell you is that somewhere in the wreckage, a single question started forming, one I couldn't put down no matter how hard I tried to set it aside.
If everything I thought I was had fallen away, what was actually left?
That's where Part Two picks up, coming soon. In the meantime, you can see where this chapter of the story eventually led in the Overcome collection.
