Imagine a game of roulette.

I'm not talking about your average game around the table with friends and a dealer with cards. I'm talking about cold metal, a spinning wheel, a 1-in-6 chance, and sweating palms around the grip of your destruction of choice.

The game is a metaphor for your very dispensable life; it is your stack of betting chips in the only game that really matters. You throw a chip in, raise the stakes, double down, take everyone's hand by storm ... or you lose it all. The chips are your soul; how far can you barter, trade and give away until you are left to the clemency of other players and ultimately are left to asked to leave the table? The table is where you should be, because if you leave the table, you leave the game, and if you leave the game, you must be dead.

My father played the game, my uncle played the game, my friends continue to play the game, and the time has come for me to fold my hand and find another way to leave this tortured game. The spinning wheel must stop, my hand must leave the grip, and I must turn away from the constant destructiveness. The house of cards is crumbling, and my thoughts can no longer be if I should be looking to the remains of the debris.

The bullet you put in the gun could be any number of things you choose: drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, or anything that becomes so intoxicating that the consequence of shooting that bullet is secondary to the gratification in the pull of the trigger. Maybe it's not the bullet, maybe it's the trigger you love, or the comfort of the grip is something you see as an anchor you can hold onto in the sweeping tide around you. Whatever your reason, you have armed yourself with your vice of choice and keep it holstered until it comes time to be the one to draw first, to be the gunslinger among the crowd of innocents and to prove to yourself that your bullet keeps you safe.

It doesn't, it never has. It never really will.

Whatever you have chosen to arm yourself with will be the weapon that will kill you. Will you be buried with that weapon? Or have you come to the conclusion that you have doused yourself in gasoline and the match you think will keep you warm will only ever set you ablaze?

I have seen the game being played when there have been no others at the table, and I have played the game when I thought I would be the only one seated at the table. Sometimes the loneliness of it all is what makes the ability to escape your choices so easy and that bullet so necessary. Maybe you just need to drown the constant droning inside your head and crank the volume on something else up as high as you can to not feel for a few minutes. Maybe that's why you run like a jackal in the night, with a foot pounding against the hard floor and you accelerating away from whatever's wrong like a freight train steaming down the tracks. You run, and run, and run, but when you stop, where are you?

You look around and the chips you've thrown away, and the reality is that you were so busy thinking about your next hand that the totality of your losses seemed to bear no real meaning. Does that mean you've stopped keeping count? Because if you have let me tell you the score, it's very simple to keep mark.

You are losing — because you keep playing the game.

Stop playing.

And maybe you think to yourself now, "I've lost too much to afford to quit" or "the game is all I have or all I really want." Well, if that's the case, then stopping spinning the wheel and tighten your hand on that grip, because if you're riding for hell's gates, don't you dare take your foot off the accelerator. That's what you want, isn't it? The adrenaline, and dancing with death itself seems too enticing a reality for you to want to stop, but stop you must, because the game is called life and your losing score doesn't permit you a redo.

So fold your cards, take your chips, and get far away from your weapon of choice. Never look back and I can guarantee you that you will only have the world to gain from doing that, but you may just walk away with some semblance of happiness. You are not destroying your family, you are not destroying your friends, you are destroying yourself, and so the only things you should worry about are getting the help you need and moving forward.

Move forward with intention, with a singular purpose of moving forward, enter a state of inertia and never stop until you have escaped whatever hounds chase you.

The problem is not who is at fault, nor the motivations for pulling up a chair and sitting down for what you may have thought was something harmless. It is alright to feel naked without the protection you chose to leave behind, it is alright to feel like you should have stayed seated sometimes, and it's OK to miss those who played with you. It is alright to have felt good at that table or to have arrived there because you thought you had nowhere else to go.

But please, for the love of everything you may still care for, abandon this wretched game.

I say game, and I continue to call it "the game" because until we stop and realize the consequences of what we do that's all it will ever be.

I've seen too many people lose the game, who were too stubborn to rise and walk away due to their own arrogance, and I myself had to make the decision to learn from those who have lost before me and unload the bullets from my gun.

I can only hope you'll do the same.