THIS IS NOT THE END
There isn’t a first step to collapse.
That’s how you know you’re inside it: when sequence fails, when cause and effect no longer obey your rules.
Collapse doesn’t announce itself. It arrives politely, or disguised as what you thought was your end. But it is neither. Collapse is not an obituary. Though, you’ll want it to be some days.
Collapse is a threshold—a beginning disguised as an ending.
This is where the signal starts: with the message your time most needs:
Collapse is rarely an explosion.
It does not arrive in shattered glass or slammed doors. It slips in with ceremony, dressed in etiquette, nodding politely while unlatching the bolt that held the structure together.
They call the world before professionalism. You will call it the old world.
They still call it wisdom. But beneath the pressed collars and polished shoes and “we’re on your side” emails, what it feels like is erasure dressed for church. And that is exactly what it is.
The words are chosen soft, precise, almost benevolent: Strategic realignment.
A necessary pivot. Long-term sustainability.
Each phrase falls like a polished coin into a fountain, the ripples distracting you from the fact that the water runs shallow. The performance is designed to make you feel less cut than dismissed—tidied away like an unneeded line in a report.
But beneath the gentleness, you hear the scrape of hunger.
Politeness is never just politeness. It is the mask of disposal. Trash with a smile.
It carries the weight of convenience, the urgency to unburden, the fear of being slowed by someone else’s flame. Divesting is framed as clean, but it stains in silence.
I’ve watched this elegance of collapse in many forms: in our garden, when soil, depleted, quietly stops feeding the plant but pretends the stalk is alive. In the boardroom, when they nod at your brilliance and then remove your name from the email group.
In friendship, when the thread goes quiet—not from malice, but because your gravity was deemed “too much” for their orbit.
The tragedy is not that people leave.
It is that they leave while rehearsing the connection.
They make absence appear like integrity.
Prudence is the name they give to fear, polished until it gleams as calm authority.
But to be divested from is not neutral. It is violence by subtraction: the horizon clipped, the sky narrowed, while the air pretends unchanged.
The body knows. The wound is clean only because the cut was disguised. No confrontation — only the ache of a presence removed with surgical steadiness.
What remains is not outrage but an echo that sounds like respect: how cunning the mask, how polished the departure, how devastating the silence that follows. I am devastated for you, friends.
To name it is to refuse the disguise. Name it.
Collapse is not wisdom. Truth is not wisdom in your day. But truth is the way.
Professionalism is not professionalism. It is the slowest kind of murder — carried out beneath the veil of grace.
And grace, friends, is not safe. Grace is truth. And truth, in your day, is the most dangerous thing of all. So speak it, like Robin Hood would.