A friend of mine, who is a man, reached out to me privately earlier today to say how paralyzed he felt seeing the flood of “Me too” posts on his Facebook wall, a phrase women are posting to indicate that they have been the victims of sexual harassment and assault. This is a good dude, as far as I know. (Here we are, now, having to say “as far as I know” about our good dude friends, because the truth is that probably plenty of guys are good dude friends unless you’re the one or two or fifteen women they crossed a line with, whether or not they realize they crossed a line. I haven’t been personally assaulted by this guy, I guess is the only thing I can really say. This is terrible for him and it’s also terrible for me. Everything is terrible.)

Anyway. I replied to him that I’m glad he’s having these realizations, but that he should be talking about these feelings to other men, not looking for affirmation or absolution or support from women, who are dealing with their own shit when it comes to men and their feelings about sexual harassment and assault. He’s a good dude, so he didn’t respond by telling me that if I was gonna be that way I’d just lost an ally, or whatever; he actually heard what I was saying and (I think) internalized it and realized the irony of asking a woman to emotionally support him as he processed all the burdens he and his cohort have asked women to bear.

Then I felt kind of bad. He was looking for things to do. Most of them are pretty obvious but maybe he needed the weight of a woman pointing those things out to him — maybe you do, too. So I shared a version of this list on Twitter. It is neither comprehensive nor without flaws. But if you’re a man unsure of what you can do right now to support women, instant changes you can make this very second in your daily life that will make life better for women (and, bonus, for men too!), here you go:

1. Overcome your own transphobia. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Accept the lived truth of NB and GNC people, whether or not they are women.
2. Be pro-choice and be vocal in support of reproductive rights. (And generous! Give to the National Network of Abortion Funds!) Understand that the opposite of reproductive choice is forced childbearing.
3. Support subsidized birth control. Support women’s healthcare. Support women’s preventative healthcare. Support medical trials that include (or even prioritize) women.
4. Support nontaxed menstrual products. Ask your workplace if tampons and pads are free. If they’re not, advocate for them to be free. Get over any embarrassment you may have about menstruation.
5. Vocally advocate at your workplace for longer and more egalitarian paid parental leave, whether or not parenthood is part of your life. Advocate for lactation spaces. Advocate for on-site or subsidized childcare.
6. Tell your elected officials that you are a man who votes and you prioritize women’s issues when you decide who to vote for. Then actually prioritize women’s issues when you decide who to vote for. Understand that women’s issues are your issues.
7. Whenever you are in a group composed of only men (whether it’s social, work, church, or whatever) ask yourself why there are no women present. Then ask out loud why. Force an honest answer.
8. Cultivate genuine, intimate, nonsexual friendships with women.
9. Seek out women to be your heroes and mentors.
10. Any time you see a building, street, institution, etc. named for a man, see how long it takes you to spot another one named for a woman. (Any time you see one named for a woman, check to see if it’s on something oriented specifically toward women, children, or families. Odds are good it will be!)
11. Ask yourself what things you don’t do, for whatever reason, that you also think of as something women tend to do. (Sew? Send birthday cards? Care about skincare?) Try doing it for a while, just to see what it’s like to be a person who does the thing.
12. Talk less. In all spaces. At all times. At a lower volume.
13. When you need support, reach out to men as well as women. Work to be a person your friends of all genders can reach out to when they need support. Create a culture of openness around yourself.
14. Consume media marketed to women. Don’t perform your consumption.
15. Deprogram your beliefs about thinness being an optimal state of feminine beauty. Deprogram your beliefs that your desire matters in determining a woman’s worth.
16. Jerk off without porn for a while. EDIT: This really should be “Pay for your porn.” In particular, seek out (and pay for) porn that’s made by women, queer people, and people of color, and that’s produced ethically. Consume sexual culture as thoughtfully as you would consume any culture. (Thanks to Jillian and others for helping me reframe this.)
17. Learn about racism and intersectionality, and do everything you can to empower and amplify black women and NBWOC.
18. Detach yourself from straw-man definitions for hot-button issues (intersectionality, cultural appropriation, political correctness, preferred pronouns, etc.) and learn what they’re really about. Unpack the real meanings behind phrases like “SJW” and “feminazi.” Believe people when they say they’re in pain.
19. Prioritize kindness.
20. Befriend children.

There are infinitely more things you can do. This is just a start. Pick a few that seem easy — and at least one that seems hard — and start doing them today. You can start the rest tomorrow.

Yesterday, Robin Williams died by suicide. I can’t know why, in that moment, he felt that ending his life was the only door, but the version of the story that sounds realest to me — and to many other people — is that his depression killed him. Since this news came out, the internet has been a sorrowful but beautiful place to be. I spent hours last night and this morning scrolling through Facebook and Twitter and feeling connected to a tremendous and temporary community, united by our love and grief for this man we didn’t know. And scattered among those, with really astonishing frequency, were the expressions of regret that so inevitably follow newsworthy suicides, variations on themes: “If only he’d known how loved he was,” “If only he’d reached out for help,” “If only he’d known he wasn’t alone.”

Historically, when I’ve seen these waves of platitudes cresting on social media, I’ve felt angry. This morning, though, I didn’t. I felt truly, genuinely confused. Why didn’t these people understand that you can’t just will depression away? It’s not something solved by “reaching out” or “knowing that people love you”; depression is not, in point of fact, you at all, but a malicious program that’s taken up residence in your brain that runs alongside your you-ness, and turns your brain into a zero-sum landgrab between malware and firmware. Not only does the depression chip away at your energy and focus and clarity, but what you do retain is so exhausted from the nonstop defense of its resources that at times you just want to give in, give up, sink all the way into the warm, quiet darkness.

And then I realized why I felt that confusion: Right now, today, I just assume everyone is depressed. That it’s the cost of doing business with a human brain, an unavoidable externality of the beautiful brutality of being a conscious, thinking mind.

On the heels of that realization I had another one: I haven’t taken my antidepressants in about 6 weeks. In the last few months, the cost of a single one of my pills has skyrocketed to $20, so I haven’t gone to pick up my prescription, and I’ve entered into an inertia feedback loop: Not taking the pills leads to the TV static creeping in at the corners of my brain, which leads to me not wanting to take the pills, leading to more static et cetera et cetera and on and on.

Here’s the thing: I LOVE my antidepressants. Different people have different experiences with different drugs, but for me, they’re tiny little miracles. They make me into me — they don’t boost my mood, they don’t give me energy. They just shove back the malware so I’ve got plenty of room to be my standard self, happiness, sadness, and all.

Until I started taking my antidepressants, though, I didn’t actually know that I was depressed. I thought the dark staticky corners were part of who I was. It was the same way I felt before I put on my first pair of glasses at age 14 and suddenly realized that trees weren’t green blobs but intricate filigrees of thousands of individual leaves; I hadn’t known, before, that I couldn’t see the leaves, because I didn’t realize that seeing leaves was a possibility at all. And it wasn’t until I started using tools to counterbalance my depression that I even realized there was depression there to need counterbalancing. I had no idea that not everyone felt the gravitational pull of nothingness, the ongoing, slow-as-molasses feeling of melting down into a lump of clay. I had no way of knowing that what I thought were just my ingrained bad habits — not being able to deposit checks on time, not replying to totally pleasant emails for long enough that friendships were ruined, having silent meltdowns over getting dressed in the morning, even not going to the bathroom despite really, really, really having to pee — weren’t actually my habits at all. They were the habits of depression, which whoa, it turns out I had a raging case of.

The point here is simple: I didn’t realize I had depression until a magic pill made my depression recede. I thought everyone felt the way I did. Until I realized that this wasn’t how everyone walked around feeling all the time, I thought, in effect, that everyone had depression.

That’s the same thought I had this morning, because — having not taken these pills in a while, which yes, I am going to remedy today, or at least I will try, because I can already feel the inertia flexing its obscene muscles — my defenses came down. Without me even realizing it, the depression silently cried hell yeah! and came rushing back. And one of the things depression is really good at doing is disguising itself as normality. At saying that it isn’t what it really is. At refusing to acknowledge that you’re not wearing your glasses, at saying “no, no, there were never individual leaves on that tree. It’s always been a green blob. Everyone in the whole world only sees green blobs.”

You might not know whether you have something malicious in your brain telling you that this is normal, that this is how everyone feels. But if your brain is telling you anything contrary to the fact that you are good, capable, and in control, and that the world contains paths to happiness which you — yes you, shitty unworthy fraudulent lazy waste-of-space you — are qualified to walk down, then you should consider the possibility that you are fighting malware and you don’t even know it. It might not be depression. It might not be something that a magic little pill can fix. But this is not what it’s supposed to be. This isn’t what you deserve. You don’t have to accept this. Everyone doesn’t feel like this. The darkness is a lie.

Do you see those trees? There are leaves. There are leaves.

Photo by Victor Camilo. For more stories like this, follow The Archipelago.

Not Everyone Feels This Way was originally published in The Archipelago on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.