Somebody got two whole weeks of feeling like themselves again. Then it popped.
That's the entire report, written on a forum with no drama attached to it. Two weeks, real ones, felt like his old self. Then, his word, it popped like a bubble, and it took a few days, not a crisis, not a single bad night. Just a few days, and it was gone.
No cause given. He doesn't blame a person, a job, a decision. It didn't break. It just stopped holding air, the way bubbles do, which is the whole point of a bubble. Nothing was wrong with it while it lasted. Nothing had to go wrong for it to end.
You've had a stretch like that. A run of days where you were more like yourself than you'd been in a while, and you didn't examine it too closely because examining good things is a way to end them faster. Then one Tuesday it was gone, and you went looking for the thing you must have done wrong, because a bubble popping for no reason is harder to accept than a bubble you burst yourself.
Here's the part worth sitting with before the weekend closes. Two real weeks happened. That's not nothing, even if the count now reads zero. The bubble existing at all means whatever made it is still possible to build again. It's not a verdict on you that it didn't last. Bubbles don't last. That was never their job.
The one thing for the weekend:
Name the last stretch of days that felt like you, however short.
Don't ask what you did wrong when it ended. Ask what you were doing right while it lasted.
Josh
P.S. I finished my 30-day Ash Journal run on July 30. In public, one page a day, no edits, all thirty.
Five minutes. One prompt. One line of ash. The first seven days are free: truevitalyou.com/journal
P.P.S. Know a guy who'd tell you he's fine? Forward him this one.