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Stop Looking for Your Rock Bottom
It’s never where you think it is.
The ocean has a floor, but you don’t. Your life can always take another dive. Either by accident, or choice. We’ve romanticized the idea of reaching rock bottom. But a bottom doesn’t exist.
You can let yourself sink forever. Your very last words could be, “It can’t get any worse than this.”
A lot of us comfort ourselves with the idea of a bottom. A point where things get so bad, they have to start getting better.
They won’t, not on their own. We already know this on some level. Still, we give into a narrative.
We think once a downward spiral starts, we have to follow it to an end. Some of my college friends used to spout this philosophy. We’d watch someone conducting a symphony of poor choices.
They’d say, “She’s just finding her rock bottom.”
Or, “He’s on a bender. He’ll bottom out eventually.”
Some of these people never did. A couple of them nearly ruined their lives beyond repair. They just kept screwing up and making excuses.
We think once a downward spiral starts, we have to follow it to an end. The bottom is supposed to magically save us from sinking…