Don’t yield to the spiral. Don’t go there. You know where it goes, you know what your life looks like once you are down in the crater.

Yes, you know the place, you’ve flirted with the crater all your life. And you know how to get there. I know because I know exactly what I tell myself. I only need to get a toe wet in the spiral and I will slide into it. Full body dive into the crater.

So, bad news, the most important thing is not going there and it’s quite easy for you to go. Good news is that you are the only one who can take you there. Yes, life can throw you a container full of bad luck, a whole transatlantic carrier full of turds. But it’s you, and only you, the one who takes the spiral route into the crater. You are the one who calls the shots.

I am not going to spend time on what living there feels like. It’s against my own advice. If you read this far, you know exactly what it feels. If you are lucky, you will only have one spiral path to the crater. If you are like the rest of us, many paths will be open, waiting for you ²⁴⁄₇.

Living in the crater is not going to be forever. You will heal. And I know exactly what you are going to say when that happens. You are going to say: I just wish I could be doing more things. No, fuck that. HEAL. You have to heal. That is your one and only task.

What is going to be forever is your knowledge of how to get there. Even in the good times, the crater is only two to three self-deprecating comments away. Maybe you use a particularly nasty question to get there. Whatever suits you. Every day, you will fight not to go there, you will struggle to tell the voice to fuck off. Again, healthy you stands a better chance on the ring. So the first good deed is healing.

How do you heal?

Start by fighting the slippery slope.

Unplug yourself from the world. Get out of the toxic places and people. When? Now. Move. You have a brain to move. Like dancing? Dance. Like exercise? Go for it. Walk outside into nature. Breathe. Think about all the amazing things that surround every one of us continuously. Read. Learn something you always wanted to learn. Listen to music. Play music. Sing. Yes, I suck at it too, so what?

You will have slips. You will yield to it, as we all do, ever so slightly. But I told you not to go there. So tell the voice to fuck off. The only thing it wants is to take you to the crater anyway.

Be aware of getting stuck in a pattern, repeatedly going over the way to get there. If you don’t want to go there, stop studying the damned roadmap. There’s nothing that you can undo. Everything that is past belongs to Death, said my friend Seneca.

You are the one who calls the shots. So call the shots. Call less shots, call better shots.