If You Are Going to Fall, Do it with Style

Man in suit falling through a cracked floor, noir style (1940s)

1. The Fall

The ground gives way. It always does. If not now, later. A missed step. A vanished job. A departed love. The world tilts on its axis without warning. This is not a failure of your balance; it is the law of gravity applied to a human life. Collapse is inevitable. Choreography, however, is optional.

As Lacan would propose, the question is never how to avoid the fall (it is unavoidable). The only question worth asking is how to style your descent.

2. The Sinthome

So what is this “style”? It is not optimism. It is not grit. It is certainly not violent or vengeful. In Lacanian terms, it is the sinthome.

Forget the medical symptom. The sinthome is something else entirely: the singular, personal knot each of us ties to keep the loose ends of the psyche from unraveling. Imagine your mind as three interlocking rings: the brutal, unmediated Real (the raw stuff of life); the Imaginary (our illusions and reflections of ourselves and the world); and the Symbolic (the world of words, rules, and laws in which we are immersed). Sometimes, the rings slip. The sinthome is that fourth ring, a unique, handmade stitch, that binds them all together.

It is not truth. It is not authenticity. It is a functional fiction: the gold lacquer in kintsugi, making a virtue of the cracks. Without this stitch, a fall is just a collapse into mute, violent chaos. With it, the fall gains a form.

3. Masks That Hold

We see this stitch-work in the lives of those who fell spectacularly, and styled their landing into history.

James Joyce felt the pull of psychosis, a failure in the Symbolic order of language itself. So he made language his sinthome. Finnegans Wake is not a book; it is a lifeline, a magnificent, private knot of words that held a mind together.

Winston Churchill battled the “black dog” of depression, a fall into the abyss of the Real. His response? The cigar, the V-sign, the rolling rhetoric (and yes, the alcohol) a persona so stout it could transform private despair into public defiance.

Frida Kahlo’s body was a site of relentless trauma, emotional and physical pain. So she painted it. Each self-portrait was a stitch, suturing pain into iconography, making her broken form the very source of her unforgettable style.

Charles de Gaulle understood that to hold a nation together, he first had to be held together. His aloof, marble-carved persona was no mere vanity; it was a sinthome so rigid it could provide the skeleton for a country’s rebirth.

Each of them (and so many others) fell. But they did not simply tumble. They orchestrated their collapse. Their sinthome was the conductor’s baton, turning discord into coherence.

4. The Seduction of the Stylish Fall

There is a reason we are captivated by those who fall not with a whimper, but with a declaration. Why do outcast figures like Lucifer, Darth Vader, or Dexter seduce us? It is not their evil; it is their style.

They represent the ultimate fantasy of the sinthome: not just to survive the fall, but to embrace it so completely that it becomes a new kind of power. They take the raw, annihilating energy of their collapse, the rejection of the Father, the embrace of the dark side, the compulsion to kill with a code, and forge it into a persona of terrifying elegance.

Their seduction lies in the audacity of their fiction. They demonstrate that even damnation can be curated. First they accepted who they were. They didn’t waste energy convincing the world otherwise. Then they did something stylish with it. They are not broken by the fall; they are defined by it. And in their stylish refusal to be redeemed by the conventional order, they offer a dark mirror to our own desire to make our stumbles, our flaws, our cracks not something to hide, but the very source of our signature.

And here is the key to survival: embrace who you are.

5. The Twist

Here is the liberating, and frightening, twist: there is no “authentic” self waiting behind the mask. The mask is the self. Lacan said it differently, but we are like an onion: each layer is us, and at the core there is nothing.

So embrace the mask you choose, not the one imposed, but the one you are conscious of. That is all. The moment you say “I am myself,” you are already wearing a costume woven from language, gesture, and history. This persona is not false; it is the only thing that binds you. To fall without style is to shatter against the Real. To fall with style is to perform your dissolution so well that even failure becomes a form of life.

6. Falling with Style

So when you feel the floor drop away (and you will) do not waste your breath asking how to stop. That is a beginner’s error.

Ask instead: What form will my fall take?

Your knot, your stitch, your style is already there, waiting in the quirks you dismiss. It is in the rhythm of how you write your emails, the obsessive order you impose on your desk, the particular way you tell a joke to deflect pain, the meticulous care you pour into a meal for a friend.

That is your sinthome. Not noble. Not pure. Not universally true.

But it is yours. And in its stubborn, fictional, glorious artifice, you will find the only coherence you will ever need.

The fall is inevitable. The style is optional.

And the style is you.

Also published at medium.com/@max.segali

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