Don't Do Permanent Solutions for Temporary Problems

I heard this sentence years ago. Robin Williams said it.

The actor. The comedian. The man who made millions of people laugh and feel something real, and who, in the end, could not find his own way through the darkness he carried.

That is what makes this sentence both powerful and painful at the same time. Because even the person who said it struggled to follow it. And that is not a reason to dismiss the words. That is a reason to take them more seriously.

Because this sentence is true. And it is hard. And most of us, at some point, do the opposite.

I did. For years.

There was a period when everything collapsed at once.

The business I had built from nothing, gone. Locked out of my own office by someone I had trusted like a brother. The team I had hired, people who had shown up every single day, were not getting paid. Not because I didn't want to pay them. Because I had nothing left to pay them with.

I started drinking. Not the kind that makes you the life of the party. The kind that makes you quieter and darker and harder to reach. The kind that helps you stop thinking for a few hours so you don't have to face what you did and what was done to you.

I stopped talking to my family. Not for a week. For years. Five, six years of silence with my mother because I could not face the conversation. Because every time I imagined it I heard her voice telling me what I already knew, that I had caused it. That it was my fault. That I had failed.

So I just disappeared from it.

That was the permanent solution.

The pain was real. The situation was genuinely terrible. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the problem, the business gone, the money gone, the trust broken, that was temporary. Things that are lost can be rebuilt. Situations change. Time moves.

What I did in response was not temporary.

I burned connections that took years to repair. I made decisions from a place of shame and panic that followed me across countries. I carried behaviours that were supposed to numb the pain but just extended it. I treated a chapter of my life like it was the final sentence.

I will be honest with you about something else.

This was not the only time in my life I reached for a permanent solution. There was a much earlier moment, a time when the darkness felt so complete that I could not see anything past it. When I genuinely believed the problem was not the situation. The problem was me. Permanently.

I was wrong.

I did not know it then. But I know it now because I am still here. And I am glad every day that I am.

That kind of darkness is real. I am not minimising it. But it is also, almost always, a temporary feeling wearing a permanent disguise.

Here is what I have learned, slowly and not without cost.

When we are in the middle of something that breaks us, we do not have access to perspective. We only have access to now. And now feels permanent. Now feels like this is just who we are and how things will always be.

It is lying to us.

The situation is almost always temporary. The job loss. The relationship ending. The debt. The shame. The feeling of not being enough. These are chapters. They are painful chapters. Some of them are very long. But they are not the whole book.

The permanent solutions are the ones that close options. Cutting people off. Destroying trust. Walking away from things that could still be repaired. Disappearing from the people who love us because we cannot face the conversation.

I eventually called my mother.

Not because I had fixed everything. I had not. I was still in a difficult place. But I called her because the silence had gone on long enough. And silence is one of those permanent solutions that eats you from the inside.

She told me she had not known what I had been through. Not really. She had heard one version of the story, the version where I was the one who caused it all. She had not heard the rest.

That conversation did not fix everything. But it opened something that had been closed for years. Something that never needed to be closed that long.

I am not writing this from a penthouse. I am not writing it from the other side of some finished transformation. I am writing it from a mattress on the floor in a room smaller than most people's kitchens.

I am 46. I work as an electrician during the day. I build things on a screen at night. I am still figuring out what I broke and what was broken for me and how to tell the difference.

But I am here. Still in the middle of it. Still showing up.

Because I stopped reaching for permanent solutions to temporary problems.

Here is what I keep learning, over and over.

Talk. Say it out loud.

To a friend. To a family member. To a therapist if we can reach one. And if none of those feel safe right now, talk to AI. Write it down. Say it out loud in an empty room. It sounds simple. It is not always easy. But something shifts the moment the words leave our heads and exist somewhere outside of us.

We stop carrying it alone in the dark where it grows and twists and starts to feel like the truth.

And here is the part nobody tells us. Learning to cope does not mean the problems go away. They do not. The more we try to build, the more obstacles show up. That does not change. What changes is how we meet them. We stop treating every crisis like the end of the story. We stop reaching for the permanent response.

We are not uniquely broken. We are human. Every one of us is different, every story has its own shape, and there is no single path through it. But the pattern, the loss of perspective, the decisions made from pain, that pattern is far more common than most of us admit out loud.

I am still figuring this out. We all are. And that is the whole point.