It is twenty past seven on a Wednesday morning, and the small kingdom of your household is, very politely, falling apart. One child cannot find a shoe — not a shoe in the abstract, but the "one specific shoe", the existence of which is suddenly the most pressing problem in the universe. The other child is refusing yoghurt on principle, a principle she will not elaborate. The dog, who was outside until very recently, is now inside, with paws of an indeterminate and rapidly spreading provenance. Your work laptop, opened on the kitchen table for the briefest of moments, has begun to ping with the first of the morning's small disasters. Your partner is somewhere upstairs, looking for something they distinctly remember leaving downstairs. And the kettle, in some final mockery, has switched itself off without ever quite boiling.

You have not yet had a cup of tea, and somewhere at the back of your skull there is a small, dry voice — the voice of a person who has been keeping score for some time — observing, with mild astonishment, that this cannot possibly be how a person was ever meant to live. And I want to take that voice seriously, because I think it has noticed something true, and I think we owe it our attention; for the question it raises is rather more interesting than we ordinarily allow it to be. "Why don't we all lose our minds?"

It is, when one examines it without flinching, a perfectly reasonable enquiry — and yet it is almost never asked in those terms; we talk of mental health as if breakdown were a private failing, an anomaly, a deviation from a robust default of inner equilibrium. But might the more accurate question be the opposite one — namely, how, given the conditions, do any of us hold ourselves together as well as we do?

The conditions of modern adult life are, on close examination, rather lunatic. We are expected to perform several full-time roles simultaneously — to be a present parent, an attentive partner, a productive employee, a thoughtful friend, an informed citizen, a maintained body, a curated online presence, and on top of all of these, an emotionally regulated person who never raises her voice or weeps inconveniently in public. We are expected to perform all of this on insufficient sleep, in homes that need cleaning, with bodies that need feeding, and — most cruelly of all — with no village to share any of it. Is it any wonder, viewed from this angle, that something occasionally snaps?

And yet, for the most part, nothing snaps spectacularly; or rather, things snap quietly, internally, in ways that have no name in the standard vocabulary. We hold ourselves together with an act of will we do not even recognise as effortful; we push through; we get the children to school, we send the email, we make the dinner; we do not, on most Wednesdays, lie down on the kitchen floor and refuse to get up. We perform, in fact, a kind of magic trick on ourselves every single day, and we have grown so accustomed to performing it that we have rather forgotten we are doing magic at all. Have you, in honesty, taken yourself — lately, in private — for the quiet magician that you are?

We are remarkably unkind to ourselves in this respect. We treat our exhaustion as evidence of inadequacy rather than as an honest measurement of the load we have been carrying; we glance at the other parents at the school gate, glimpse what looks like composure, and presume that they are, by some grace denied to us, actually composed — never considering that they too may be holding themselves together with the spiritual equivalent of paperclips and string, and that their composure is, like ours, an extraordinary effort being mistaken for a natural condition. What if your tiredness is not a flaw, but a measurement — what if it is the body's honest reading of the weight you are bearing, and the only fault in the reading is that the weight was never going to be one person's to bear?

There is, I think, an old and rather important idea that has been quietly displaced in our hurry to become modern: that human beings were never meant to do parenting alone. We were not designed, biologically, to raise children inside the small, isolated capsules of nuclear families; we were designed to raise them in the company of grandmothers and aunts and neighbours and older children, in a steady, multi-generational rhythm that had patience built into it. What modern life has given us in exchange for that older arrangement is convenience; what it has quietly taken away is community; and the cost, paid every Wednesday morning at twenty past seven by the parent looking for the lost shoe, is enormous, and ought to be grieved properly rather than simply endured.

Have you grieved this loss, do you suppose, with the seriousness it deserves? Most of us have not, because we assume the difficulty must be ours alone — we cannot see anyone else's struggle, and so we presume there is no struggle, and we accept our solitary version of it as a private failing rather than a structural one. We are private about our small collapses. We do not knock on the neighbour's door at half-past six and admit, frankly, that we are not coping today. We carry on, and we carry on alone, and then we are surprised that the carrying-on has begun to feel so very heavy.

What would it take, do you think, to admit out loud that one is, at this moment, not coping? It would take very little — a single sentence, a single phone call, a single honest conversation with a friend who has not been brave enough to admit her own version. And yet that single sentence is, for most of us, the hardest sentence in the world; for we have been raised to believe that needing help is a kind of moral failing, that competent adults do not require it, that if we were better organised or more disciplined or simply better, the load would not feel like this. The load, dear reader, feels like this because it is, in fact, very heavy — and because you are, in fact, one person, and the load was not designed for one.

What practical kindnesses help, when one is close to the edge? Sleep, when one can have it — for sleep is the single most underrated medicine on earth, and we deprive ourselves of it routinely. Asking for help, even when the help is small and imperfect. Lowering the standard — "the house does not need to be tidy, the packed lunch does not need to be artisanal, the email does not need to be sent before bed". Almost everything we are doing at full pelt could be done at three-quarters pace, and the world would, in all probability, not end. What might you stop doing this week, just to see if the world does in fact end? I suspect — gently, but with some confidence — that it will not; and I suspect, further, that the small private collapse of one of your impossible standards would be met, by most of the people around you, with a relief you cannot yet predict. They are tired too. They are watching you for the cue that says it is all right to not do this perfectly; and you have not lost your mind. You have, in fact, kept it, against rather extraordinary odds, for years. Perhaps it is time, quietly, to congratulate yourself for the magic trick, and to put down, for one Wednesday, just a few of the impossible things you have been carrying without quite noticing.