The Day You Stop Performing Your Own Life

There is a moment, and most people who have lived long enough have experienced at least the edge of it, when the performance becomes too heavy to continue at its current weight. Not dramatically, not in the way that collapses tend to be described after the fact, with the identifiable breaking point and the clear before-and-after and the definitive moment of the thing finally giving way. More often it is a gradual and almost imperceptible accumulation of the cost, a slowly increasing burden that has been carried so consistently and for so long that the carrier has stopped noticing it as a burden and has started experiencing it simply as the weight of existing, the normal condition of being a person who moves through the world in the way that people move through the world. And then something small happens, something entirely disproportionate to the response it produces, and the response is not to the small thing at all but to the accumulated weight that the small thing had the misfortune of being added to at precisely the moment when the accumulated weight had reached its limit.