The Edge Between Breaking Down and Breaking Through

Last week, I came home from training after a solid session — tired, hungry, satisfied.

I walked into the house and instantly got hit with questions:

What’s the rest of your day look like?
What’s planned?
Can you help with this? Can you check that?

Normal questions. Easy questions. Nothing dramatic.

But something in my system froze.

My body tightened.
My brain shut down.

And instead of answering, I ignored everyone, lowered my head, walked outside, and ate my lunch alone.

No meltdown.
No anger.
Just… overwhelmed.

And here’s the part that bothered me:
It happened over nothing.

Still, I felt like my stress cup was too full, and the smallest ripple made the water spill.

Every season I live close to this line — the edge between being slightly overwhelmed and genuinely flooded.

So here’s the question I’ve been wrestling with:

Is this a flaw — a lack of emotional tools, boundaries, presence?
Or is this a feature — the exact place where growth happens?

I’m not sure.

So this week, I decided to explore both sides.

Stoicism has always had a clean way of describing the overwhelmed state.

Seneca wrote: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”

Most of my overwhelmed emotion doesn’t come from the events themselves — it comes from my interpretation of them.

A question isn’t pressure.
A conversation isn’t an avalanche.

The stress I feel comes from me — from living in the future, from gripping onto things out of my control, from holding onto mistakes, worries, or stresses instead of focusing on where my feet are.

Marcus Aurelius puts it even more bluntly:
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it.”

The training session didn’t overwhelm me.
The questions didn’t overwhelm me.
My internal state did.

I wasn’t present.
I wasn’t breathing.
I wasn’t grounded.
I had no space inside.

And when the cup is full, tiny things feel huge.

Here’s the practical truth Stoicism offers:

The nervous system can’t differentiate between real pressure and imagined pressure.
But the body can be taught.

Shrink the focus.
Come back to the breath.
Return to what’s real, what’s controllable, what’s right here.

Gratitude widens the cup.
Presence stabilises the system.
Breath resets the internal noise.

There’s another part of me that doesn’t believe this overwhelm is a flaw at all.

Because sometimes it doesn’t feel like a malfunction —
It feels like expansion.

My life is growing faster than my systems are.
That creates pressure that stretches the edges of who I am.

And when I look at it through that lens, the experience suddenly makes sense.

It feels like strain.**

When you lift a weight that’s slightly too heavy, your muscles shake.
You’re not failing — they’re adapting.

The emotional version of that tension is overwhelm.

This is where philosopher Nietzsche becomes useful —

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he writes:
“The spirit becomes strong only through burden…
And the burden breaks what is too small.”

Nietzsche wasn’t talking about suffering for suffering’s sake.
He meant that identity expands when it carries more than your old self could handle.

Not avoiding weight.
Not collapsing under it.
Carrying it long enough for the self to reorganise around it.

When I look at this season:
There is so much new.
Becoming a dad.
Learning to lead.
Living up to expectations.

Every single one of those things adds load.

Of course, it feels heavy.
Of course, it feels chaotic.
Of course, small things feel bigger when everything inside is being reorganised.

This isn’t failure —
My capacity is being rewritten.

Maybe this isn’t me “not coping.”
Maybe this is me growing into the person who can cope.

Overwhelm, in that sense, becomes a signal:

Not that I’m in the wrong place —
But I’m standing at the frontier of a bigger life.

Nietzsche phrased it in the poetic way only he could:
“One must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star.”

Not chaos as dysfunction —
chaos as rearrangement.

The old structure cracking
because a new one is forming.

A Zen poet, Ikkyū, once wrote:
“If you want to know the path,
do not look at the ground.
Look at the person walking.”

Meaning:

It’s not the load, the schedule, the pressure, or the noise that defines the path —
It’s who I become while walking through it.

And that’s the real question of this season:

Am I leaking energy through worry and projection?
Or am I carrying more weight because I’m growing into a bigger version of myself?

Is this a crack in my foundation?
Or the stretch that creates new space?

Is my overwhelm something to clean up?
Or a signal I’m exactly on the edge where greatness lives?

I don’t know yet.
But I’m staying curious.

Because the truth — like most things in a long season — is probably both.

Some days, the overwhelm is a problem.
Some days, it’s a feature.

My job is to keep walking, keep noticing, keep adjusting —
and keep becoming the person who can carry all of it with clarity.

That’s the work.
That’s the path.
And that’s where I am right now.