After the Implosion: How I Built a Life That Stands

Seven years ago, my life effectively ended.

Not in an obituary or hospital scene—just a quiet implosion that stripped everything I thought I knew about love, work, and home.

I was in my thirties, married, with two children. On paper, everything looked fine. Behind closed doors, everything was breaking. What followed was a year of unmaking—emotionally, financially, spiritually. I lost nearly everything. I went on welfare. I learned what it feels like to hand over bank statements to strangers who determine how much you deserve to eat. I wrote at night, in the blue glow of my laptop, because the page was the only refuge I had left.

There’s a strange stillness in that kind of ending—when you wake up one morning and realize the world hasn’t noticed you’ve disappeared. You still get the kids off to school. You still buy groceries. You still answer emails. But underneath it all, something essential is gone; the scaffolding of your life has collapsed, and only you can see the dust.

If you’ve ever had to start over from nothing, you know: recovery doesn’t begin with healing. It begins with function.

You get the lights back on. You stretch every dollar. You show up for the people who depend on you, even when you’re hollowed out. Healing comes later, when the body stops bracing for impact.

Survival is a holding pattern.
A pause between endings and beginnings.
Eventually, you have to decide what to do with the silence that follows,
because the real work begins when you choose to build again.

The Slow Architecture of Repair

While my personal world was crumbling, my professional one was quietly shifting—toward construction. I began working in the field of prefab and modular housing. What started as a job quickly became an obsession.

Modular housing is often misunderstood as “cheap” or “temporary.” But real modular design is about precision—an understanding that structure isn’t fragile when it’s intentional. You build in controlled environments to reduce risk. You repeat systems that work. You anticipate failure before it happens.

Somewhere between writing technical briefs and interviewing engineers, I began to see my own life as a kind of structure study. The same principles applied:

• Load paths—how weight travels through a frame.

• Thermal bridging—where the cold seeps in.

• Envelope integrity—what keeps the interior safe from the weather.

People collapse the same way buildings do: Stress accumulates; weak points give way under invisible pressure; grief, like water, finds every breach. By the time the damage becomes visible, it's already deep.

I realized that rebuilding a life follows the same physics. You can’t fix from the top down. You start at the foundation.

• Stability before aesthetics.

• Function before finish.

• Honesty before perfection.

So, I re-engineered everything: my budget, my boundaries, my definitions of worth. The welfare year ended, I found steadier work, I rebuilt from zero. Eventually, I became a recognized voice in housing design—invited to sit on industry boards and to write for the Canadian Standards Association on prefab standards.

I’m not sure if I believe in closure, but I do believe in architecture—both structural and emotional. Every decision is a beam, every belief a wall. If you build carelessly, things fall. If you build consciously, they endure.

What I Learned About Making Things That Last

Here’s what five years of reconstruction taught me:

Sustainability Begins Internally: You can’t design a stable life with unstable materials. If your self-worth depends on other people’s approval, you’re building on sand.

Safety is Integrity, Not the Absence of Risk: A house that never flexes will crack. A person who never bends will break. Resilience is engineered through movement.

Repetition is Not Failure: You will rebuild the same wall more than once. You’ll think you’ve finished healing only to find new leaks. Keep mending; that’s how things hold.

Healing is Not a Clean Blueprint: Some walls stay crooked. Some floors creak. You learn to live with the noise.

Function Can Be Beautiful: Utility is its own art form—a clean sink, a paid bill, a quiet morning. Beauty lives inside survival once you stop apologizing for being alive.

For You, if You’re Building Too

Maybe you’re still in the wreckage. Maybe you’re already pouring the new foundation. Maybe you’re holding a hammer with shaking hands, wondering where to start.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to stay curious about what could exist beyond the fear.

That’s where the architecture of repair begins.

---