You’ve been adapting. Making adjustments. Giving it another shot. Telling yourself it will probably feel different tomorrow.
And then you hit a point where you just can’t do that anymore.
That’s how I feel about my podcast today, leaning heavily on the word *today* because tomorrow I might wake up and feel completely different.
But today, I’m feeling the full weight of how much effort this process takes and how little reward there is in the beginning. I hope a seasoned podcaster or two will read this and send me an encouraging message. (Please do. I could use it!)
Right now, I’m in the trenches.
And it got me thinking about breaking points: Why do we expect reward before we’ve fully weathered the storm? And why does it sometimes feel like everything goes wrong all at once?
For me, it’s usually October.
I’ve called it cursed before. To be fair, October is the month I lost my leg. In the amputee community, we call it an *ampuversary*. There’s also a psychological term for the emotional response that can happen around the anniversary of a traumatic event: an *anniversary reaction*.
It’s a recognized response that can happen to people with or without PTSD. Sometimes the date arrives and, even if you aren’t consciously thinking about what happened, your body remembers. I’ve experienced it, on a spectrum, my entire adult life. Some years a better than others, but October has become my annual breaking point.
We are constantly being asked to adapt. Push through. Be positive. Keep going. But when you hit the breaking point, that all feels like bullshit.
There are plenty of things happening in America that make this year feel especially terrible, and somewhere on that list is the fact that I’m watching work dry up, questioning what I’m building, and wondering whether all this effort is actually going anywhere.
And that got me thinking about algorithms.
I work in marketing, so it’s become a tool that’s part of the process and it’s helped me get as far as I have without a team or a real budget. Algorithm aren’t new, they just became accessible and the foundation is simply: identify patterns and follow them.
People aren’t patterns.
We can wake up one morning and completely change direction. We change our minds. We contradict ourselves. We want something desperately but by the time we get it, we wonder why we wanted it in the first place.
We build careers and relationships and identities around what works, and then one day what worked, doesn’t work anymore.
We are not algorithms.
And maybe that’s part of why breaking points feel so uncomfortable.
We’re so used to adapting.
Adapting to the job. Adapting to the relationship. Adapting to the expectations. Adapting to the thing we said we wanted. Until eventually, there’s nothing left to adapt.
Maybe that’s what a breaking point actually is? Not the moment everything falls apart. It’s simply the moment you realize you can no longer keep adapting to something that isn’t working.
Sometimes that means you walk away. Other times it means you change the system. Sometimes you change yourself. And sometimes you just admit: this isn’t working for me anymore.
That’s the annoying thing about being a person.
Most of us don’t optimize particularly well.
We just keep changing.