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I am blown away by the growth of our little community here in the past couple of weeks. A lot of you found me this month through my collapse videos on Instagram or TikTok. So let’s talk about it, because there’s more than one kind. From the outside, they look virtually the same. But from the inside, they’re completely different, and what helps depends on which one you’re in.
This is based on my Spiral framework, which has 4 stages: the Ashes, Ember, Flame, and Rise. If you want to go deeper, you can read The Primer first.
The Ashes collapse
My ashes collapsed into utter flatness, with nothing underneath. Every night I’d find myself out on the porch, staring into the dark. I didn’t remember walking out there. And it didn’t hurt. I knew something was wrong, and I’d get those little embers now and then, but mostly it was nothingness and emptiness. No emotions and no feelings.
Then other days it flipped. I was overfull and overflowing. There was too much, and I couldn’t hold it together. That was the Ashes too. Flat one day, flooded the next, and never anywhere in between.
I like to equate this to a pressure cooker. When it’s pressurized and cooking, everything looks calm and almost a little boring, but twist that tiny vent knob on the top and stand back. In the Ashes, you don’t control that knob; it flips between calm and erupting whenever it feels like it.
The Ashes usually descend slowly over time. You eventually just resign yourself to “this is life,” or “this is just who I am.” Your life doesn’t really feel like it’s going anywhere, because you aren’t really in it.
The Flame collapse
The Flame collapse is different because you can see what is actively burning away. It just doesn’t feel like there is anything to do about it.
I go much deeper into this in Spiraling Into Control, but for me, it was serving at my church. My divorce had been finalized, and I had begun dating again. I was excited to share my new relationship with someone I had thought was a close friend. Instead of sharing my joy, she was appalled at my “behavior” and threatened my position in the church. I watched as this fake facade of friendships burned away. All of a sudden, that was gone, and I sat there thinking, well, I don’t know what to do now.
Those things needed to go. They needed to be burned away. But it felt like my whole life was actively disappearing in front of me.
That’s the main difference. In the Ashes, things fade out without you noticing. In the Flame, you’re sitting there consciously watching things burn, and you have feelings about it. You’re pissed off that certain people don’t want to be around you anymore. You’re scared because you don’t know what the next step is. The Ashes are empty. The Flame is desperate.
If you’re in the Ashes right now
Look for the embers. They’re the little sparks that tell you something’s not right and that there’s more than this.
When you find one, hold it. Don’t explode it into a fireball (that’s a whole different article), where you grab that spark and change your whole life overnight. Just look at it. Figure out where it came from, and why it’s sparking now.
I want you to hear that there is something more. It’s going to be slow, and the embers are going to be tiny. But finding those tiny embers is what’s going to help you climb out of the Ashes collapse.
If you’re in the Flame right now
It hurts, and it sucks. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But the things burning away were serving your costume and your mask. They weren’t serving the person underneath. And there is a person underneath, one you’re ready to be introduced to.
That’s why I really discourage looking backward. When you say “I just want to be who I was before,” what you’re asking for is the costume back. I get why. Everything seemed fine when you were wearing it. You were the yes person, doing everything everyone wanted, the good little soldier. It felt safe. It wasn’t serving you.
The Flame is about finding a way to serve yourself. It means you have a role to play in your own life, and a say in what happens in it.
So which one are you in?
If you’re flat, or swinging between flat and flooded, you’re probably in the Ashes. Start looking for embers. If you’re watching your life burn and you’re furious and scared about it, you might be in the Flame. It feels worse, and that doesn’t mean you’re going backward.
Not sure? That’s what the You Are Here assessment is for: youarehere.laurentobey.com