Coming Apart | Coming Together

I had a come-apart this week. Not familiar with the term? I first heard it many years ago from the nurse who helped me grow up as a doctor. It exactly describes the feeling when you lose hold of your emotions, previously tightly pulled together by the edges and held in check, and let go of all of them, all at once. If you witnessed it happening in a small child, you might call it a meltdown.

If you’ve been alive long enough, you’ve had a come-apart, even if you didn’t know what to call it. Mine usually come at completely unpredictable moments. Life is ticking along at its usual, insane pace; stress levels are “medium-high” but not out of control; and then whammo: some small, unexpected thing happens. I would describe myself as fairly self-contained when it comes to emotions; I definitely don’t wear mine on my sleeve, and few people are in the circle who see the raw ones. High stress situations (emergencies, urgencies and crises) kick me into performance mode: think, plan, DO! Most days, you can throw pretty much anything at me and I will roll with it, so come-aparts are pretty few and far between.

This week had all the key ingredients: a busy work schedule, a global pandemic, and life proceeding like always. Recognizing my end-of-day stress level was high, I decided to hit the treadmill; a run and a good sweat are usually a successful combination for stress reduction. All was going well until I knocked an AirPod out of one ear, sending it flying. Curse words! A quick scan of the immediate area while running yielded no clue to the location. More curse words! Pause my run, quickly look under and around everything, also no results. Back on the treadmill, finish my run without music, grind my teeth at the injustice of it all. Grr. The zen of the run was definitely gone.

Post-run, I begin the search in earnest for the errant headphone. I grab a broom and sweep up treadmill dust and miscellaneous debris. I get down on the floor with my cellphone flashlight and look under and around the treadmill and nearby furniture. I wish I was good at finding lost things (I’m not). And then a stray thought hits: I wish my dad was here. You see, he was a finder, one of those miraculous folks that can sniff out where a misplaced item wound up. And then I came apart.

Back in the day when shopping in stores was a thing you did, I would often walk through the aisles, picking up items as I went, until my arms got so full I had to set things down to reorganize or find a cart. Every once in a while, I’d misjudge that moment and drop things because I overloaded my carrying capacity. Come-aparts are like that moment when you drop everything because you missed the fact you were carrying too much. While they feel like a disaster in the moment (oh no! did I break anything?), they have benefits: releasing the tension created by trying to hold everything at once and allowing you to pick things up more carefully, cataloging and organizing as you go.

Was my come-apart because of my work week? Nope. The pandemic? Nah. The lost AirPod? No way. The memory of my dad? Not specifically; I’ve definitely moved to the stage where thinking about my dad brings smiles instead of tears. Some mysterious combination of all those things led me to unravel, I suppose. It’s hard to explain the reason for a come-apart to anyone else. “I lost my AirPod” made no sense and was the best I could manage. And for a bit, I needed to let it all loose. Then slowly, I could gather up my emotions again, take hold, and come back together.

Off my back step: the world coming back together after a storm.