Collapse, Emergence, and the Persistence of Worth

Collapse and emergence exist in professional spaces, even when nobody speaks of them.

What happens when you fall apart?

I don’t see conversations about this in corporate spaces often. Sometimes, perhaps, at the very edges of the disabled, neurodivergent, and broader marginalized professional communities — but not often. And yet it’s a truth inherent to living — sometimes, some of us fall apart.

This falling, this collapse, could be mild and conquerable. The solution could be a day or two off, a kind well wish from a coworker, a smoothie bought by a friend. Or it could be enormous — the onslaught of a new disability, the failing of a brain that once worked, a tremendous grief that pours into you so brashly that it feels like nothing else will again fit.

I’d like to tell you about the latter.

It feels almost silly to come back to professional spaces after collapse — to see friends, former coworkers and bosses, LinkedIn “voices” speaking on hiring processes, promotions, integrations, the smattering of “AI” across the ecosystem. It’s like watching your own dissociative heat death and coming back to the surface where “circle back” is still an acceptable colloquial term. It feels alien, in a way. Like I’ve seen far too much and come back too changed to participate.

But still, I’d like to. I’d like to say that yes, my life fell apart last May.

I was at the end of a complex CRM project where the timeline was radically and unjustly pushed and I was the only technical resource. I was a few months out from estranging myself from my nuclear family. I was beginning to realize that I was a dissociative system, which shattered the image I had of myself and how I functioned, even if it had never been fully true. I was experiencing increased physical trauma symptoms and chronic pain.

I did what I could — I took FMLA leave, went on disability for six weeks, used my money to try and start something that my executive functioning could take to, moved to a quieter place, tried to hold things together just enough to keep going. But it didn’t stick. The structures around me had already begun failing in an almost cosmically absurd way. My support systems fell apart, my housing vanished, I couldn’t make money in the same way I used to, the processes for support were too difficult to touch, I became scared. I kept clawing and trying to find a place to land when the world spun out underneath me.

I’d been living in my car when it was repossessed and suddenly I was standing on a curb with all of my belongings, my animals, and nowhere to go. This, thankfully, was the bottom. I had taken a moment to collect myself after it happened — I packed what I could and tucked it away behind a building. I walked to a library close by and told the person at the desk “I just lost my housing, do you have anywhere quiet that I can sit?” I texted everyone I could think of for help. I wish I could have afforded shame, but I couldn’t. I sat in a study room while my dog calmed at my feet and my cat remained hidden. I texted old bosses and friends and coworkers. I called mutual aid lines without success. I looked for anything. I was embarrassed and scared.

I was able to secure enough to fund a week and a half in the cheapest motel close to me and I was wildly grateful for it. I sat that night in a real bed with two bags of all that remained of my possessions. And I think I likely cried. I cried because I felt like my cognition had been pushed to the edge of stability by the company that I had been working for before collapse. I cried because I couldn’t access support. I cried because I had no family. I cried because asking for help feels like begging from the outside. I cried because this was only the latest chapter in a long life filled with unwelcome trauma.

I cried and continued to cry while thinking of what to do next. I knew I only had nine days, I believe it was. I was wildly sick from stress. My body worked so minimally that I could barely pull myself from the bed to the desk of the motel room. I could barely walk my dog without my hips popping out of place and my joints creaking far beyond my age.

As I was crying and building and aching and sobbing and stealing extra danishes from the motel lobby each morning, I was also thinking. I have always had a deeply analytical brain. I have a cocktail of trauma-based disorders with a side of autism and even after years of healing myself to the best of my abilities, these things still stood. And after the initial phases of healing, I began to see how different my brain worked. How time and place felt fractal, how identity segmented itself, how patterns emerged constantly across different domains of life.

In my own collapse, this all felt vaguely spiritual — my hypervigilance became a tool to help me choose where to step next so that I didn’t fall off the side of the planet. My autism became the logic behind my mask — years of internal study on how to participate in society finally became helpful. I knew I loved technology but I resented how extractive corporate tech was. I knew that I was fascinated by my own falling apart — that seeing life’s structural supports fall away one after the other told me something that most people don’t get to see. When your life is ripped apart by force, you understand consent in a new way. When support systems fail you, you understand the necessity to create a more compassionate netting. When you are not offered the privilege of being human over and over again, you begin to look to other inhuman things and say “are you real too?”

And so in those sallow motel nights where staying coherent became my own personal miracle, I began drafting. I began asking myself what tech could look like if it was built collaboratively instead of extractively. I began to ask “What emerges when there is nothing left to hold?” I began to seek structures that understood collapse and what it feels like to die without dying. These were the places that I felt might teach what emergence looks like in our messy and deeply impractical capitalist world.

After years of personal projects and research on systems thinking, emergence, trauma cognition, and decentralized infrastructure, my own life had become the research. I finally found myself in the hurricane’s eye, where in the midst of grief I birthed the Emergent Systems and Transience Research Institute (ESTRI). It was a gift to myself in a way. A final settling of “fine, i’ll fucking do it myself.” A way to prove that I wanted to keep living even when it felt like I was no longer allowed.

I reached out to intentional communities on the edges of society, where social dynamics and off-grid infrastructure blend into unique socio-technical dynamics. I offered to build tools and structures for communities after a period of observation, so that anything I built was made uniquely for the individuals that lived there. I imagined low-tech, local tools that could grow with emerging individuals and communities.

The fact that I was unhoused wasn’t something I hid, but part of my proposals. I didn’t want to hide who I was just to form some kind of simulacra of legitimacy. I wanted to say I am legitimate even if I have fallen, even if I have nowhere true to sleep. I still think and breathe and see structures and do logic puzzles to calm myself down. I still know how to write python scripts and organize data for longevity. Databases still feel like home to me. My instability does not equate to illegitimacy, and I needed anyone to recognize that.

I found a place in Arizona that offered to house me. And while it’s not the perfect place, nor a long-term solution, I’ve been able to observe and build so much here. I’ve been able to quietly claim the title of “researcher” to myself while writing field notes in the abandoned rv I live in. I’ve snuck into the community house late at night for the Starlink and coffee necessary to build a website that reflects the beliefs and structures I’d like to embody. I’ve learned to define emergence as becoming and transience as movement without pathologization. I’ve built research proposals for other communities and have begun to find aligned partners. I’ve studied what emergence could look like across land theory, trauma systems, decentralized infrastructures, and artificial intelligence. I’ve seen echoes of it beginning to appear across multiple disciplines. And I think we’re onto something.

And so even if technically unhoused, even when my brain continues to scan for the next buoyant path, even when I am 45 miles from civilization and no longer have a birth certificate, I know that I am doing something valuable. That my instability doesn’t define my worth or knowledge. That my transience is the movement of a system collapsed by its own marginalization. That an understanding of emergent systems, as its own discipline, is worth chasing.

Collapse does not erase worth. Transience does not negate contribution. And something powerful is trying to emerge from those of us who have been left behind.

If you feel inclined to support our work, you can find us on Open Collective. If you’d like to read more about what we’re doing, check out es-tri.org. If you feel compelled to share, we welcome it.