After my [divorce? broken engagement? break-up?] in 2018, I sorta had a [personal meltdown] that lasted for about seven years. I'd call it my Eat, Pray, Love phase, except I did none of those things.

Well.

I did start to pray, but that's [another story].

The mid-life crisis begain with a wash out from living my "best life" in Seattle, lose/fumble my job/career, start sleeping in my car, put $20,000 of debt on a credit card, distance myself from many people I knew well, travel solo to Europe, go to Burning Man a couple times, and, from there, face the reckoning that I am barely in control of my life. This is how my 30s came to an end. Incidently it was also the time I started smoking a lot of weed.

Maybe it was an early mid-life crisis1, maybe it was a loss of identity that came from suddenly decoupling with someone, maybe it was full on karmic body check that knocked me flat on my ass. I guess what it was, with the benifit of hindsight, was a chance to introspect. 

Why was my life like this? Why is my life like this? 

After a relationship breakdown of this magnitude, the ground seemed to give way underneath my feet. The identity I thought I had established simply dissolved. The mask fell away and what was left was... unsettling. Being unable to sustain the lie– the front-facing ego– to someone very close was earthshattering, and after the break-up I had nowhere to go and nothing to do but pick up the pieces.

 Maybe it is better to have loved and lost, but holy fuck does losing love ever hurt like hell.