I think the hardest part is actually letting yourself hit the bottom and stop trying to hang on to the unsupported branches of a life that’s had its roots kicked out from under it. It also gives you a great opportunity to renogotiate the terms of your happiness with yourself. You can renegotiate your idea of what it will take for you to be happy or content or invested in where you are. You can take stock of your relationships and what they might actually be worth, having reached a point of real degeneration where you can’t just take them for granted any more and might have to love without them. It gives you clarity about what is worth saving and what is worth treasuring.

The great advantage of dashed expectations is the chance to renegotiate more reasonable terms with yourself. What is enough value to be worth preserving? How much effort is it worth? What is enough of a result to be worth being content and continuing to invest? What can you lose as an enterprise that wasn’t worth the investment?

No one really ever wants to let ourselves fall to that level. Even just psychologically, because let’s all admit that what feels like complete collapse and hitting rock bottom is often not anywhere near the actual possible lowest bottom we could reach.

Realizing that, it gives us a chance to consider what we need to make strong so that it will endure and sustain us if we have another, even further, fall. If things went really wrong, catastrophically wrong in an unrecoverable way, what is there in our lives that will remain and endure to keep our souls alive? What anchors are we ignoring and undervaluing that we will need if the storms truly rise?

It’s funny, I wasn’t able to lose weight until I hit a kind of bottom, physically and emotionally. That’s what it took for me to start to build and turn things around. I got myself back into writing and reading after hitting a rock bottom intellectually and emotionally and socially. I swore off social media, isolated myself, and then started tentatively reaching out fingers to find my place again. I looked low enough to be able to start building again and investing again and finding value again.

The key thing, really, is to not try to escape the bottom, but to just let yourself settle there without trying to desperately claw your way out or hang on or cling to some life raft or be driven to some island of refuge. That’s the kind of circumstance under which you do not make good choices. People have affairs, get addicted, live dangerously, act stupidly, all to try to not be where they are and stay, or imagine they stayed, at some higher level. But there’s a kind of purity in letting yourself settle, letting your life shrink to the size of your sight and your reach, and then just starting from there. Don’t miss the chance to look around and take stock. Let it sit for a while. You may eventually find that things you thought you had given up on, you actually haven’t, and you have the energy to start working at the bottom again. But you need to give yourself that time to find out.

Maybe all you have is your parents. Maybe all you have is your kids and a relatively stable job and decent home. Maybe those are enough to negotiate a happiness from. There are plenty of people who learn to love with less. And if you can start from there, sometimes you can build on that. Hitting bottom lets you see what you actually have and what you don’t and start using that and appreciating that and building toward that.

The real problem is, a lot of people don’t use the bottom well. They don’t see it for the opportunity it is to recalibrate. How little can you be happy with? Where can you go from there? How can you begin to reverse your trajectory so you’re moving up instead of falling down? Because it’s really the feeling of falling that hurts. Once you’re actually at the bottom and accept it any movement upward, no matter how small, feels far more satisfying and meaningful than falling. Trajectory often matters more to people than position. And relative values mean more than absolute ones. This holds whether you’re at the top or at the bottom. It’s why people who have fallen far less than they could can still feel so miserable and people coming up slowly from much further down can still feel content and encouraged.