Trigger Warning: Suicide
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On December 15th, a friend of mine from high school took a massive overdose of a whole cocktail of things. He has been non-responsive ever since and has now been removed from life support. It is no longer a question of if but when.

1/

Mike was a smart, funny, talented man, who fought with a chronic disease his whole life—depression. I think it’s important to talk about that. If he’d had a heart condition, or diabetes, or any number of other chronic diseases, this would be easier to write.

2/

But somehow, because the organ that he was having problems with was his brain, the conversation is more fraught. It shouldn’t be that way, which is why posts like this _must_ be written.

3/

When your heart tries to kill you, or your pancreas, or your liver, it is much easier to make the differentiation between the you that is facing a mortal threat and the part of you that _is_ the mortal threat.

4/

It’s hard to accept that your brain, the thing that makes you _you_, is broken or breaking or otherwise damaged. It feels like _you_ are at fault in a way that just doesn’t come into it when your lungs are trying to murder you.

5/

I have asthma and I also have OCD. Both are relatively mild. Both are chronic conditions that I can manage with medication and various exercises and mental tools, but until I had an epiphany a few years ago, they hit me intellectually in enormously different ways.

6/

I never felt any particular guilt over my airways trying to kill me, but when it was my brain being an asshole, that felt different. It felt like a failing. Then, one afternoon all those messages about mental illness being illness sank in and I had a shift in perspective.

7/

For me, OCD is basically a continuous running voice in the back of my mind. It is constantly suggesting all manner of horrible things, but it’s non-impulsive—I have zero desire to act on any of those suggestions.

8/

The shift in perspective was simple; it took that voice and moved it from the category _inner me_ coming up with terrible ideas, to the category _my brain the organ_ being an asshole again, just like when my airways decide to be an asshole.

9/

I don’t know if that perspective shift is something that can or will help anyone else, but I’m sharing it here because I know it helped me, and maybe it can help you too. I can’t do anything to help Mike, but maybe in this small way I can help someone else in his memory.

10/

Goodbye, my friend, I know we hadn’t been particularly close in recent years, but you were part of my Open School family, and knowing you were out there always made the world a brighter and better place.

End

P.S. My friend Mike died a few hours after I posted this.