It was physics

AM Survivor #25

Truth is, you never fall all at once. There is no single moment of breaking, no dramatic ending.

This isn’t a movie.

It’s just a slow slide downward. Almost invisible, because it’s interrupted by brief moments of triumph. Those are the worst. They hide what’s inevitable. They give false hope.

It’s in those fleeting moments that a person starts to believe again that they can push the limits just a little further - one more month, one more quarter.

To make it happen, they take out one more loan. Because “this time it will definitely work.”

They bend reality. They stretch it.

And on a micro scale, it even seems to work. The market responds, a long-lost client reappears - and even pays an advance. The curve that had been falling for months twitches slightly upward.

HA! The tide is turning! It’s a sign! A proof that persistence was the right path.

But it’s not a miracle - it’s an anomaly. A temporary distortion in the trend.

Reality only bent for a moment, allowing a brief breath before snapping back into place.

However in the very moment, you don’t see that. You don’t want to. Instead, you cling to the belief that you’ve beaten the odds. That pure, animal determination has a power that transcends the laws of economics, logic, and mathematics.

Each day without catastrophe becomes a success. Each small victory - a sign that luck has returned.

But luck doesn’t exist.
Only balance does.

Every disruption of it carries a price. Every miracle that lasts too long stops being a miracle and becomes an accounting error. You can stretch reality, bend the numbers, change the narrative. But the laws of physics are relentless - the tensioned matter eventually breaks. It tears apart.

That’s when the moment of truth arrives. You realize it was never the world going against you - it was you fighting against its rules all along.

It wasn’t bad luck. It was consequence.

Every founder who has tried to survive knows this feeling - the tension between hope and logic, between determination and denial.

They know how fleeting salvation tastes, and how it deepens the illusion. They know that, over time, the illusion begins to hurt. Because the more reality is bent, the more violently it demands correction.

Because reality can be bent and stretched - but never infinitely. Sooner or later, it snaps back into shape.

And when it does, everything unnatural breaks. It was never luck. It was never misfortune. It was physics.