The Spiral

October, 2018. Third year of studying medicine - metaphors incl.

Nov 21, 2025

One metaphor keeps following me.
If life really does move in a spiral: open or closed, full circles or broken ones

and if we are fated to collide again and again with the same crises, only changed in shape,

then every time I enter one, I do it with the hope that something exists beyond it.

Years ago, I wrote that it was hard for me not to see the stars.
Like that pilot from the Christmas episode of Doctor Who, I needed at least one streak of light.
Something — anything — to follow.

At one of my first therapy sessions, I chose a metaphorical card.
There was a moon on it.
A stream of light.
A spaceship.

Early sessions are always the same:
impatient, frantic, a desperate urge to spill everything at once, just to make the pain stop.
If I use the surgical metaphor I leaned on far too often, despite not having the smallest desire to cut another living or dead body open, then I was ready to take a scalpel and carve out every abscess from myself.
No anaesthesia.
Just point to where it hurts, and I’ll slice.

You can end therapy when the acute phase passes.
Many do.
But at that time I was obsessed with psychotherapy, with neurobiology, with the mechanics of my own mind.

I thought:
If I push a little further,
if I go a little deeper,
if I try a little harder,
I will find something better than a life-without-pain.

Who could have known that “a little” would turn out to be a fucking chronicle of life-threatening behavioural patterns.

Some light.
Exudative. Hemorrhagic.

But I kept diving deeper anyway.
Chasing that clean beam I imagined must exist somewhere.

The summer after ninth grade, I had a dream.
I remember every detail, even though I told the story only once that year and forgot it for a decade.
It was black and white.
A small bird.
Inside her chest — a bright blue crystal, full of light.
She flew to me, scattered into pieces,
and I took the crystal.

My friend said,
“It is in you now.”

Fifteen minutes in a linen dress under rain and wind is all it took today
to feel the reality of what is happening to me.
A sky without stars —
no star to wish on.

But I don’t need starlight anymore.
The spiral has closed.
The circle has locked.

If only the version of me who exists today could step back to July 7, 2016,
take that girl by the shoulders,
and tell her:

You’ll make it.
It will be hard, sometimes unbearable.
Euphoria will fling you onto the sharp edges of reality.
But you’ll survive every piece of it.

A year ago, I was admiring autumn.
I was in a good mood.
And still, I thought:
I have a choice.
Eat wolfsbane, the atropine will do its work,
or walk into the lake and stay there.

I went home instead and made myself two cups of hot chocolate.

Of course everything after that was difficult.
Of course it hurt.
Of course it wrung me out.

But who knows.
Maybe today’s version of me really did materialise from rain and fog—
walk up to that tense, shivering girl in a dress —
and speak to her.

Maybe she told her there would be beautiful moments.
That she will mourn what’s lost,
cry when she needs to,
make mistakes,
and keep going, again and again.
That her stubbornness —
her impossible, unbearable stubbornness —
is her strength.

And one day
she will simply live.
And she will take pleasure in what she has.