The Weight of Existence: Strength Is Not Knowing How to Fall Apart

Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey

If i were as strong as everyone thinks i am, then i would have the strength to force change into my life. But im not, if anything my enduring such awful things for such a long time is evidence of my profound and enduring weakness.

The Weight That Has No Handle

You don’t wake up. You return. That’s how it feels. The body rolls back into awareness like a machine reluctantly powering up after a long, unapproved shutdown. No moment of rest. No sense of relief. Just... resumption. Another round.

Your eyes open because that’s what eyes do. Your lungs inflate because that’s what lungs do. Your heart keeps beating, like a houseguest who didn’t get the hint. None of it feels volitional. You are not doing these things. You are being done by them.

There’s a glass of water ten steps away from the bed. You think about it the way someone else might think about Everest. Ten steps. That’s ten separate decisions. That’s a whole choreography. Shift. Sit. Stand. Move.

Reach. Return. Lift. Swallow. Don’t drop. Don’t fall. Don’t cry.

You rehearse it in your head like a sequence for disarming a bomb. You’re not thirsty enough yet. You wait.

And this is what they mean when they say “functioning.”

Fatigue isn’t tiredness. Tiredness has a reason. Fatigue just is. It lives in the marrow. It coats the brain. It wraps around joints and memory and will. You don’t choose it. You don’t earn it. It chooses you, and it doesn’t care what you need to do today.

There is no clean way to explain this to someone who hasn’t felt it. You start reaching for metaphors that don’t hold. “It’s like walking through syrup.” “It’s like gravity turned up a notch.” “It’s like dragging a version of yourself who doesn’t want to come.” None of them land.

Because the truth is worse than all that.

You are not dragging anything.

You are the thing being dragged.

This is what Heidegger meant when he said we are “thrown” into the world. You didn’t ask for this. You didn’t build this room, or choose this brain, or decide to be a body that refuses to cooperate with itself. You were placed here. And the weight of that is not symbolic. It is not poetic. It is not abstract.

It is in your arms when you try to lift them. It is in your face when you try to answer a text.It is in your back when you sit too long trying to care about anything.

You are not resilient. You are not strong. You are here. That’s it. And the fact of being here still, again, always is somehow both too much and not enough.

Time does not stop. You’ve tried. Time keeps happening to you. It pulls you forward. It expects your participation. It offers no reprieve for inertia. No adjustment for density. You are carried along whether you like it or not.

And this is the real cruelty of collapse: You don’t get to. You don’t get to stop. You don’t get to fall down and stay there.

You get to keep going.

You get to be a consciousness inside a body inside a world that will not pause for either of you.

And somehow, this is called survival.

Step, Step, Glass of Water, Step

There is a glass on the kitchen counter. You know that. You even know which one it is. It’s clear, heavy, and a little foggy near the base from the last time you washed it without drying it properly. You can picture it exactly. The sink it sits beside. The way it catches the light at this hour. The distance between you and it.

It’s maybe ten steps away.

And that’s the problem. Ten steps isn’t a walk. It’s a sequence. A long, deliberate string of instructions you have to execute manually because the autopilot is broken. Has been for weeks.

The first step is thinking about standing up. Not standing. Just... thinking about it.Then you check whether your body will agree. It doesn’t, at first. There’s a full second of static, like someone changed the channel.Eventually, you roll your weight to one side. Your hand hits the bed frame. Your feet find the floor. Slowly. Like you're not sure the ground is going to catch you.

You pause. Nothing has happened yet, really. But you’re winded. Not out of breath just mentally winded, like the thought buffer is full and you need to delete something before you can load the next command.

Then: push. Stand.There’s that awful moment where your balance lags behind your intent. It always does. You don’t fall. But you think about falling. You think about how easy it would be to sit back down and not get up again. You think about what that would mean. What it would cost. Whether it would matter.

Then: move. 

To someone else, it’s a glass of water. To you, it’s a ritual. A task with rules. A negotiation. An act of endurance.

You walk like the floor might give out. Like the air might turn solid. Every step feels like an argument you’re having with the room.Your joints don’t hurt but they resist. Not like injury. Like disinterest. Your body isn’t against you. It just doesn’t see the point.

When you finally reach the counter, you stare at the glass like it’s a stranger. It doesn’t look heavy. But it is. You lift it slowly, careful not to let it slip. Your grip is fine. You’re not shaking. But something about the movement feels... foreign. Like you’ve had to remember how to do it. Like someone else is piloting you from a few seconds in the past.

You fill it. You drink. The water tastes exactly the same as always. No revelation. No clarity. No reward. Just completion. Just hydration.

Then: place the glass down.Then: turn. Then: walk back to bed. Then: sit. Then: collapse, but only metaphorically. The body remains upright. The body does what it's told.

There is no one here to witness any of this. No one sees the steps. No one measures the effort. No one applauds the glass.

And that’s the part that tightens around the throat. Not that it was hard. Not that it was humiliating. But that it was invisible. And tomorrow, it will be again.

This is what it means to survive without spectacle.To drown upright.To pass the test no one knows you're taking.To live in a body that has become its own terrain, its own task, its own barrier.

You Can’t Put It Down

You say you want to collapse.

But there’s nowhere to fall. No ground that will receive you. No arms, no void, no clean descent into oblivion. Collapse implies direction a movement downward, a submission, an end. But this isn’t that.

This is staying upright because your body doesn’t know how to do anything else.

This is surviving by default.

Existence is an irrevocable contract. Not a promise. Not a gift. A contract the kind you don’t remember signing, the kind you can’t opt out of. You are here. That’s it. That’s the whole clause. No amendments. No exit.

You want to put it down. The weight. The effort. The task of being. But there’s no it. There’s no object. No pack. No external pressure. Because the weight the thing you want to lay down is you.

You are not carrying the burden.You are the burden. And you are being carried forward by time whether you want to go or not.

Fatigue is not a state. It is not the result of doing too much. It is the refusal of being not by the will, but by the body itself. A kind of protest without teeth.

You want to rest.But rest implies a difference a before, an after, a restoration. There is no restoration here. There is only less. Less energy. Less patience. Less capacity to imagine relief.

You want to give up. You fantasize about the clean surrender. The collapse people recognize. A body on the floor. A pause in the narrative. But collapse doesn’t want you. It won’t take you. It keeps you alive just enough to continue. That’s the cruelty: there’s no release. Only continuance.

You are both the prisoner and the prison.

Thomas Nagel says each moment of time is equally real. That you owe your future selves the same ethical weight as your present. That makes sense in theory. In theory, everything does.

But try telling that to the version of you who can't brush their teeth. Try explaining timelessness to a brain that hasn't tasted silence in weeks. Try justifying continuity to a body that doesn’t want to exist at all, but can’t figure out how not to.

You are not choosing this. You are not surviving heroically. You are enduring in place, like rot, like rust, like a

structure that doesn’t collapse it just sinks.

You don’t break. You drag. That’s what people don’t understand.

They think strength is doing something hard. But this? This isn’t strength. This is the absence of permission to stop.

You Can’t Lose What You Are

This is the hell of it.

You want to give up. You want to lose. You want something to snap. To rupture. To end.

You imagine failure like a mercy some clean erasure, some final exhale where no one asks anything more of you, not even the effort of being. You imagine the moment of collapse, not as death, but as subtraction. A peeling off of layers. A severing of rope. Something.

But it doesn’t come.

There is no clean break. No falling. No disappearance.

Because you can’t lose what you are.

You can’t misplace your body. It follows you. You can’t turn off your mind. It finds you. You can’t step outside your own existence. It holds you like a contract you forgot you signed.

You are the subject and the object. You are the cliff and the one falling from it. You are the witness. You are the body that survives the fall. And then, somehow, you are the one who gets back up.

Not because you want to. Not because you believe in anything. Just because that’s what time does. It drags you forward, and your body keeps happening.

There is no surrender. There is no heroic fight. There is no narrative arc, no triumphant return, no rock bottom followed by redemption.

There is only more.

People talk about resilience like it’s a medal. Like it’s something you earn. But most of the time, resilience just means no one stopped you. You kept breathing because your body kept breathing. You persisted because there was no one around to let you do otherwise.

That’s not strength. That’s not choice. That’s just what happened.

It looks like bravery from the outside. From the inside, it’s mostly boredom and shame and trying not to spill your drink while your hands shake for no reason.

There’s no applause for that. No quote to put on a poster. No lesson to extract.

Just one more morning. Just one more glass of water. Just one more body in motion because stillness isn’t an option.

The Agony of Being Unbroken

You remain.That’s it. That’s the whole story. Not because you fought. Not because you believed. Not because you wanted to. You remained because the body did what it does. It continued.

You’re not still here because you’re strong. You’re still here because no exit was presented. There was no fork in the path. No red pill, no portal, no divine off-ramp.

There was just the next second. And the second after that. And the ones that followed like inventory.

Collapse gets misunderstood. People think it’s a dramatic fall, a sobbing surrender, a scene. But real collapse doesn’t perform. It doesn’t even interrupt.

Real collapse happens under the skin. In the space between actions. In the way your hands hover over a keyboard but don’t type. In the way you rehearse a text message for forty minutes and never send it. In the way you carry out basic functions with no conviction, no presence, no return.

Collapse isn’t failure. It’s the impossibility of failure. Failure would imply a deviation from the plan. There is no plan. There is only this.

You don’t fall apart. You don’t shatter. You don’t burst into flame or tears or screams. You hold. You hold because no one ever taught you how to drop.

You are too tethered to fall. Too embodied to disappear. Too alive to be absent. Too aware to be gone.

So you drink the water. You sit back down. You stare at the wall. Maybe the page.

You call it rest. You call it coping. You call it pacing yourself. You call it survival.

You call it living.

Because that’s the only word they’ve given you for this.

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Thick Thought Thumper of the week- 'The Weight Of Existence'

The Weight of Existence