It’s time to pull out my pencil crayons; the shades of gray given to me over the years courtesy of a malignant suicidal depression. I’m going to try and fill the spaces between the blacks and whites, hoping to crosshatch connections between and around everything I’ve said here so far.

Earlier, I spoke of the underlying perspectives that seem to dominate diagnosis and treatment. Those of needing to heal and fix, and those of managing and coping. These are perspectives of illness and disability. They are perspectives that say you’ve-gone-off-track-and-you-need-to-come-back. They are much better beliefs than those held generations ago, where mental unrest was ascribed to demonic possession or as an untreatable brokenness that needed to be warhoused in a sanitorium or asylum. My own belief is that our current views are underpinned by a notion of conformity, of an expectation of returning to normality. Mental disorder is a wrench in the expectation of everyday reality for both me as the sufferer and for the community that surrounds me.

My recurring desire to kill myself upsets the societal tenet that everyone should want to live. The expectation that you ought to keep yourself alive is a strong norm in our society, one anchored by evolutionary imperative and moral conditioning. By being in a place outside of this norm, by naming my experience of not wanting to live, the conformist social immune system gets enacted — it wants to bring me back into line. It wants to regress me to the mean.

In this knowledge, I could position myself in one of those same struggles for the norm. I could position myself as an advocate for the mentally disordered rallying against a system that’s wrong. I’m aware that the undertones of this dissenting cry already run like spider veins through my words. I’ve put targets on our current mental health system and its practitioners, I’ve taken shots at my family and community, and I’ve laid aim on societal views. In naming these antitheses, the easy road seems to be one of anger and militancy. That road, however, erodes the chasm of difference so that it becomes wider. The only way to resolution, to synthesis and evolution, is one of compassionate understanding and acceptance. I need to understand you just as much as you need to understand me.

In the case of illness and disability in our loved ones, our greatest wish for them is to be well. This is difficult in mental disorder as there’s no tumor to be seen or biopsied, no blood test to confirm a disorder’s presence. It becomes difficult for others (and for myself) to discern where the illness ends and where the cognitive, emotional, and spiritual self begins; let alone plot in definitive ways the constellating interactions between these bodies. It’s confusing for me and it’s confusing for the people who love me. While it may be shitty at times to feel the prejudiced nature of those who want to return me to the norm, sometimes preaching methods of inevitable upward progress as a way of doing so, I remind myself that their assertions are done from a place of love and a lack of lived experience. It’s up to me to recognize where that love exists and have compassion for where lived experience is thin.

In all my years of living with depression, of it’s recurrent spells and seductive calls for death, I’ve come to accept that I’ll never be normal. This is what it means to expand the assumptions of mental health into analogies of disfigurement or permanent disability. What I live with is a fundamental part of my being, the ways in which it makes me different are scarlet threads in a tapestry of self where there should be beige.

Some struggle with their unwellness — their difference — and their suffering overcomes them. These are the completed suicides. The vast majority of people who kill themselves lack any kind of connection or dignity in their execution. While they were living, part of the struggle and suffering in many of these souls was lack of acceptance. If we don’t start at a place of expecting that the suffering should return to the norm then we start at a place where we don’t invalidate their experience. If we accept their experience as totally valid in the moment — as that moment stands in the totality of their lives — we don’t alienate them by asking for conformity.

Unconditional acceptance and genuine connection are strong amulets to help energize one’s will to live; invalidation and alienation suck it dry. By withholding your prejudice that successful treatment is a foregone conclusion and releasing an individual from a demand to stay in this world, you create a better empathy for their present reality. You accept how things really are for the individual in the moment, surrendering value judgments of whether that reality is right or wrong or somewhere in between. By accepting that an individual might be fundamentally shattered in a way that gives them a right to their death you can create in them a stronger will to live. If you do this, I don’t need to fight you for what my truth is. I don’t need to exhaust an already tired soul by morally defending a personal hell that wants me dead. I can be as I am and receive the amulet of your empathy.

My point here isn’t to sanction suicide. I can already hear the incredulous voices of loved ones close to me: “do you expect me to believe that I should accept your death?”

No. That’s a moral argument for another day. It’s a question that imagines me already dead in some hypothetical future moment. It would be then that we’d debate the question of whether I was selfish to do myself in, scream at the sky at everything I’d left behind, commiserate on how tragic my pain was and how I’d now transferred that pain to others.

The distinction between what’s now and what could be is an important one. It dissects this moment right here right now from other moments in the future. In those days or weeks from now, I could be in full remission and well again. Better yet, I could be fully cured and never again have the wolves descend from the hills to hunt me. Maybe I’m on some course of treatment and getting by. Or I could be dead. These are all possibilities. They all represent a change from my current state, for better or for worse.

But they aren’t the now.

Accepting the present in someone with mental distress means holding the different worlds of what is with what could be. It means accepting me in whatever state of reality I’m in at this moment — even if that reality is a dark and hopeless one — while keeping an open mind for all future possibility.

At the times that are most unendurable, the fact that I’m still breathing means that I’ve decided to endure one minute more. Either through a strength of will to take that breath or by a lack of courage to snuff it out, I’ve made the decision to stay. In those moments of utter darkness, ones that I may be concealing with long learned and sophisticated masks of outward coping, the very best thing you can do is accept what’s real for me.

Unconditionally and without attachment to the future.