Identity and Nervous System

Scaffolding holds a building up while it's under construction, then often stays long after the walls can hold their own weight, quietly becoming part of the view. The same happens with achievement and control, structural at first, necessary for getting through what needed getting through, then never removed to check whether the person underneath can stand without it. The only way to know is to test, carefully, whether the walls hold weight on their own.

An old pipe holds for decades, built for a town that no longer exists. Then the town grows, the pressure rises, and a seam that sat quietly for years finally gives. This isn't failure, it's a system carrying more than it was ever rated for. The same is true of a person's capacity for intensity, built at one age, for one set of demands, and never revisited as life outgrew it. The break isn't the problem. It's the information.

A contractor taps a wall before it comes down, listening for what it's carrying. Most people don't get that chance with the thing they're removing from a life. Some walls were never load-bearing, and their absence reads as relief once the dust clears. Others were holding more than anyone accounted for, and the ceiling adjusts to a deficit it wasn't built to carry. The difference rarely announces itself before the sledgehammer, only after, in what the house does without it.