Rebuilding After Falling Apart: What Progress Can Survive
By Britino Milburn · Liminal Framework
A few days before recording my second Liminal Framework video, I was struggling to get out of bed. I was questioning the point of engaging with the day.
When I filmed, I was at a track and field championship in Ottawa, watching my brother-in-law compete in the 100 and 200 metres.
Both moments belonged to the same life. I was still finding my footing after another serious destabilization and a prolonged hospitalization. I was also standing in a public environment that, years earlier, I would have struggled to tolerate.
That combination is what I wanted to talk about. Falling apart again had raised difficult questions about my progress. Being at the track meet gave me something concrete to consider alongside them.
When life interrupts the trajectory
I use the phrase “hard reset” for an event that interrupts the direction or pace of a life. The plans that carried you forward suddenly become difficult to continue. You have to reconsider how you are living, sometimes before you have the energy or clarity to know what comes next.
For me, hospitalization has been one of those interruptions. For someone else, it might be a divorce, a relapse, a loss, or another major change.
The event becomes part of your story. It can affect your choices and your sense of who you are. It can also become so prominent that it obscures everything else: the capacities you developed, the relationships that remain, and the decisions still available to you.
In the video, I tried to turn my attention toward the rebuilding. What would I do with the life in front of me now?
I could begin answering that without having a complete explanation for everything that had happened.
The doubt that followed me into recovery
While I was in the hospital, I questioned whether I had any place developing a coaching program or speaking about stability. I had just experienced another major setback. Who was I to talk about rebuilding?
That question exposed a standard I was holding myself to. I seemed to believe that, to share what I had learned, I needed to demonstrate lasting immunity to difficulty.
My experience did not support that standard. I had found stability before. I had also encountered circumstances I struggled to manage. Both were true.
Recognising that helped me ask more useful questions. Which supports had helped? What had become difficult to sustain? Where had I taken on more than I could manage? What needed to change this time?
There was still a responsibility to be honest about the limits of what I knew. My experience gave me something to share, and more to learn. It did not make me an authority on someone else's recovery.
Seeing the pressure, push, crash pattern
One pattern I identified was pressure, push, and crash.
I took on pressure, tried to meet it through more effort, and kept pushing until I could no longer sustain the pace. Persistence was familiar to me. Adjusting the pace before reaching that point required a different kind of attention.
This was my reflection on a pattern in my own life. It was not a complete explanation for a mental health crisis. Still, pacing was something I could examine and work on.
The useful question became: what am I asking myself to sustain, and what is it costing me?
For a high performer, doing more can feel like the most credible response to difficulty. Rebuilding can inherit that same demand. It can become another project to execute quickly, another version of yourself to establish, another test of whether you are capable.
I wanted to notice that possibility as I developed Liminal Framework. The work would need a pace I could live with. Otherwise, I could carry an old pattern into a new purpose.
What the track meet made visible
Being in Ottawa gave me a different view of my progress.
Years earlier, I would have avoided an occasion like that. By the time I recorded the video, I could be there, enjoy the environment, and support my brother-in-law. The races also brought back memories of my own childhood in track and field and the records I had held.
My recent hospitalization mattered. So did this ability to participate in the world.
Standing at the meet did not settle every question about how I was doing. It showed me that some of the rebuilding I had already done remained available. A setback had not erased every capacity I had developed.
There was meaning in attending as a family member and spectator, too. I could take part in a familiar world through connection and enjoyment. My place there did not depend on producing a result of my own.
That is a form of progress I want to keep noticing: the life I can participate in, alongside the things I can achieve.
Honesty with boundaries
For a long time, secrecy had shaped how I dealt with difficulty. Speaking openly represented a change in how I related to my experience.
In this video, I also drew a boundary. I wanted to share what I had learned about rebuilding. There were parts of my experience that needed other spaces for support and processing.
That boundary mattered to the project. I could speak honestly while choosing what belonged in public. I could offer a reflection without making the audience responsible for helping me work through everything behind it.
Liminal Framework could begin from that position: a person sharing the process, with enough distance to reflect and enough humility to acknowledge that it was still unfolding.
A next step that fits the day
At the end of the video, I spoke about small steps. I wanted to encourage people who felt unable to engage with their lives, and I spoke with conviction about what repeated action could make possible.
The part I want to carry forward is the invitation to find a manageable next step. Its value needs room to exist even when it does not immediately change how you feel.
On one day, that might be attending a family event. On another, it might be eating, resting, asking for support, or reducing a demand that has become too much.
The size of the action has to fit the person and the day. One difficult morning cannot tell you everything about your future. One good afternoon does not require you to take on the world again.
You can ask: what would help me participate in my life today, at a pace I can sustain?
That question belongs in the space Liminal Framework explores: after a familiar way of living has been interrupted, while the next chapter is still taking shape.
At the track meet, my answer was to be there. To watch the races. To support someone I cared about. To notice what I could still enjoy.
That was part of my rebuilding, too.
Watch the original video: Rebuilding After Falling Apart: Why I’m Not Hiding It.
Read the first post: Stepping Into the Light: Beginning Before I Felt Ready.