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The breaking point

 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:36 / 20.02.03
So, what would be the breaking point for you?

I ask with a degree of self-interest; it looks like perhaps there may be a point where you have to stop and say this is not my beautiful life (letting the days go by), so what would it take for you to break cover? How awkward and awful does life has to be before whatever you are, on Barbelith or elsewhere, ceases to be whatever or wherever you are?

For Avon, famously, it was Gauda Prime. For you, when does Josette Simon give up on the whole nasty business and start doing voiceover work?
 
 
w1rebaby
22:50 / 20.02.03
When you find yourself really wishing you were a fundamentalist because everything would be so simple then.
 
 
8===>Q: alyn
23:08 / 20.02.03
I don't understand the question, but I'm scared.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
16:45 / 21.02.03
Me neither. What are you talking about, Haus? If you're too subtle/tactful/guarded no-one will be able to answer a question they don;t understand.
 
 
that
16:52 / 21.02.03
I think he means when do you have to come out as yourself and stop just letting the current carry you, letting yourself misrepresent yourself. You have to get up and say "Bugger it, I wanted to be Indiana Jones when I was a kid, and look at me, I've done bugger all about it. Time to remedy that, methinks."

That's how I interpreted it, anyway. But I can't really answer the question.
 
 
Persephone
17:20 / 21.02.03
when do you have to come out as yourself and stop just letting the current carry you

If that's the case, and very nicely put it is... for me it was being stuck under a suffocating plastic tarp with my mother-in-law-to-be at an outdoor concert, and having her light up a cigarette under there. Lord have mercy... I seem to remember hitting father-in-law-to-be (under the tarp, too) and screaming at him not to touch me. And thus, I was not married at the age of 23 to a nice boy (also under the tarp) that everyone said I was lucky to get. Who once told me that I shouldn't go on the Pill because he wasn't comfortable that I was making that kind of commitment to him.

Reader, I dumped him. I let myself get fucked in the back of a pick-up truck by a handsome devil of a psychopath, whom I subsequently stalked. Then I quit the job that everyone said I was lucky to get, and got a job in a coffee shop and tried to write a novel! Which I was an utter failure at --the novel, not the coffee shop. I was darn good in the coffee shop.

Is that what you mean?
 
 
Constitution Hill
18:26 / 21.02.03
For me at least, not yet, it seems.

Or maybe it happened when i was nine, and i'm destined to be the lazy-arsed layabout i've been since then. Strange to think that I stopped trying sixteen years ago, and haven't found the impetus since. But I hope to. What are you waiting to relinquish, Haus?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
19:47 / 21.02.03
Interpreting the question two different ways-

firstly, the point when I realised NASA were never gonna suddenly go "hey! these adult mathematicians who have done all the training just ain't gonna cut it! What we want is a weedy Englidh kid"

secondly, the point where, having been a cynical bastard for ages, I finally thought I'd discovered true love. And she dumped me for one of my mates.

So now, here I am, Mr Nasty evil bastard...

actually, I'm not much good at that, either.

I'll just swear a lot.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:33 / 22.02.03
Do you mean "when do you have to stop living up here, and start living down here"?
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
09:43 / 23.02.03
I think he means when do you stop accepting down here and start angling for a bit more of up there than the guy in the cubicle next to you has.

Not too long ago really when I turned up on the next temp assignment and was yet again undervalued and very little was expected of me, including any form of progression.

I get these little bumps every now and again that move me one rut further along. Hopefully this one is different.
 
 
Bill Posters
13:42 / 23.02.03
I too am totally confused. However, IMHE, these pivotal moments arrive with their own momentum and take one over totally. It's not that anything specific is 'taken' to create them, really, though one can reterospectively look for such a teleology (and usually find several). Don't worry about 'what it may or may not take'... if/when the time comes, you'll know. Hope you're okay, BTW.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
16:48 / 23.02.03
When someone or something shoves it in my face and says 'do something about it you fathead', usually. I'm not very good at being proactive so it takes an external influence to make me actively change things.

But occasionally, when I have become so frustrated and irritated with myself that even waking up inside my skin makes me furious, I have done things to change my situation off my own bat. Most notably, upon realising that, though I was good at data entry, it was no fun and I still had no money: after which I decided that I might as well do something I actually wanted to do, and have no money, and am much more comfortable with myself as a result.

You know - when living with your stuff is enough to make you want to scratch your skin off, that's when you need to do something, IMO...
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
17:02 / 23.02.03
Well, realising last year that none of the staff on my degree course gave a fuck if I passed or failed or dropped dead kinda did it for me.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
17:07 / 23.02.03
I've read the question, and the abstract, over a couple of times, and I still really don't understand. The closest I can get is perhaps interpreting it as 'what do you do when things are so awful, objectively awful that there is no way of looking at/interpreting them so make oneself feel at all better. when the facts are the facts and they're shit'.

( and am having a really heavy sense of deja vu. have you posted something like this before, a few months ago, Haus?)

will have a think. but I think, would follow Bill's POV.

Hope you're ok. hon.
 
 
grant
19:31 / 24.02.03
It'd take a lot for me to break cover; I pretty much settle in where I'm at with a vengeance until something significantly better (and more importantly *stable*) comes along. I'm pretty happy, all told. Contented. That's what I've always aimed at.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
19:44 / 24.02.03
I always value form over content.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
22:27 / 24.02.03
Erm. I think I am at breaking point and have been for about three months. I have become an erratic kettle and my lid's about to pop off. I actually had to leave the house without telling anyone tonight because I felt so contained. I don't want to elaborate further... roll on June.
 
 
Caroline
22:54 / 24.02.03
It depends who you are trying to convince. For everyone else's benefit you can keep the charade going as long as your imagination keeps up to speed. As soon as you accept that you are the only one that knows the whole truth then life gets easier. If you don't know the whole truth yourself then now is the time to stop and figure it out before everything really gets screwed up.
 
 
Brigade du jour
01:26 / 25.02.03
I hope I don't go nuts and get, like, violent or nothing.
I hope I don't internalise all the stress and bad stuff and hurt myself.
I hope I don't let things get on top of me.
I hope I don't really have a breaking point.
I hope that answer the question.
I hope.
 
 
telyn
01:49 / 25.02.03
Felicia - you know you really do have a breaking point (and that is a good thing), when it's just too much and you will go and hurt someone who deserves it or just fuck off into the sunset. Really if you've even considered posting in this thread then you do have a sense of self-preservation and that is what a breaking point is all about - not where you break, but that there is a point that is as far as you are prepared to go before it all gets too much. A breaking point is where you will remove yourself from a situation in order to retain your health and sanity.

Personally, I do let things get on top of me, but only to a certain point. I do internalise a lot of stress but I also try and relieve it later. I do get violent and throw things at people (though very rarely). I do have a breaking point, but hopefully (for now and later) I will spot before I get too close to it and change more in advance so I never do feel completely broken. *Nothing* is worth feeling completely broken.
 
 
angel
09:34 / 25.02.03
Something I've learnt about myself, as well as for others in general, is that we won't do anything to change an issue in our lives, until it becomes impossible to not change. I liken it to the universe trying to teach me a lesson and taps me on the shoulder gently, if ignored, she gives me a shove in the back, and if this too is ignored she comes at me with a baseball bat to powerful to be ignored.

There is a point of critical mass for everyone, but it is different for everyone, and triggered differently for everyone.

It's a shame that we seem to have to put our selves in such pain and torment before we act to change our lives, but it seems to be a common pattern. Whether the change is a good or bad thing seems to depend upon how you use (or don't) the opportunity presented. Boy have I missed some doozies!

For me I see these events in a positive way, but for others this may not be the case.
 
 
Icicle
09:59 / 25.02.03
yeah breaking points are definatly positive and useful. a lot of people stay in jobs they hate rather than doing something they'd love, and some people do this for their whole lives, like they never get a breaking point. I'm afraid that this'll happen to me, I'll be stuck in some boring job and it'll become so routine that I'll just never break! Right now I'm trying to do everything possible to follow all my dreams to try and prevent ever getting into a situation where breaking points are necessary.
 
 
Quantum
10:18 / 25.02.03
I try to bend not break. When it all gets to critical mass it's too late, you have to say 'fuck it' well before then. Let it slide and remember what's important, whatever it is to you, instead of being oppressed by details. Shit can tie you down like the Lilliputians did to Gulliver, but in the end you let yourself be restrained I reckon.
But nobody's perfect. I once moved house, quit my job and left my fiance in one wet weekend in September, needed a change. Sometimes you just spin out.
 
 
No star here laces
11:54 / 25.02.03
My life is beautiful, I pity you all...
 
 
No star here laces
11:54 / 25.02.03
My life is beautiful, I pity you all...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
12:45 / 25.02.03
Uh. no. your wife is beautiful, though. I pity her.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
16:32 / 25.02.03
I think usually, when a big change comes, it's something that's been building for a while beneath your attention. It may seem like something is the final straw that fucked the camel's belly-dancing career, but a lot of the time you just use this to pin an inevitable change down to something easy to identify.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
07:39 / 26.02.03
Are you even going to put us all out of our misery and let us know what the hell you were talking about, Tann, or do we have to keep re-interpreting the question?
 
 
No star here laces
07:49 / 26.02.03
Yer beautiful in your wrath.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:02 / 26.02.03
It was just a question, Whisky. If it had been more binary it would have been far less interesting.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
10:01 / 26.02.03
To you maybe, Nostradamus.
 
  
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