From the Editor’s Desk: Crash (Premium)

In early 1987, I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to go back to college after wasting a year in art school, the first of two times I'd try to course correct from that mistake. My father lived there with my three sisters and Sharon, the woman whose home my wife and I would later buy here in Pennsylvania. He had an extra bedroom, offered to pay for my education, and I was in love with the American Southwest at the time, so it seemed like a no-brainer.

I have many memories from that year. Among them are a house fire right after that Christmas limited my time in New Mexico, and I had met my future wife just months before I left, complicating matters. But I was reminded recently of an episode in which I went out to go jogging in our neighborhood and I experienced a scary moment in which my vision started contracting from the sides into blackness, despite the brightness of the day. Albuquerque is at a high altitude, higher than Denver, and I had perhaps pushed it too hard. And as my vision disappeared, I stopped moving, crouched down, and shielded by eyes with my hands. It was terrifying, of course. But it was also temporary, thankfully. I hobbled back to the house, and I never jogged in Albuquerque again.

I always think about this moment when I get overwhelmed. It was a visceral, physical embodiment of what it feels like to just shut down when there's too much happening at once and my brain can't keep up. There are minor versions of this that I sometimes experience with things like software coding, where I feel like my brain has reached some limit and I just have to walk away from it. And then there are more profound versions, as you might experience with a personal tragedy. My son almost dying as a baby, me holding his lifeless body in my arms as a doctor sticks him with needles and gets no reaction, is perhaps the most obvious example.

But pain and tragedy are a spectrum, and life has a way of constantly probing to see what one can endure. It's an indignity, something we all deal with occasionally, passing the interim periods by either forgetting--my go-to coping mechanism--or counting down to the next problem. There are professional versions of this, like YouTube blocking me and everyone else from getting into my own channel back in January, or PayPal suddenly refusing to accept payments on my behalf, both times without a single warning. And there are personal versions, things that seem to amplify and become more common as we get older. It never ends.

I don't know how other people cope with life's roadblocks, but based on a lifetime of experience, I'm sure some handle these things better than others. The one thing I do know is that everyone has a limit, a breaking point. You run into a wall eventually, are so overwhelmed that you almost shut down completely. This was my experience during and after my trip to Seattle last week, and I'm still trying to figure out why it was so bad.

I have ideas. And I have a sneaking suspicion...