How many LVM have you heard excuse their behavior with "my anxiety/depression/other mental illness"? They act like these conditions entitle them to A. eternal unemployment, B. cheating, C. no effort to treat you like a human being, much less a romantic partner.

Meanwhile, Queens left, right, and center are battling mental health challenges and/or carrying significant physical disabilities of all kinds while still managing to A. hold down a job, B. remain faithful to their partners, and C. treat everyone in their lives with care. FDS women are often doing all of this on top of learning and implementing FDS principles, and it takes a LOT of emotional energy to break out of pickme-ism.

What are the differences? Well, women are much more likely to seek out treatment, for one. And two, women see these challenges and conditions as their responsibility to manage and deal with, while men see them as everyone else's responsibility to manage and deal with.

I'm right here in the weeds with all of you, I've been managing my conditions for years, and God knows the pandemic hasn't made it any easier. I've discovered that battling depression is really not about big philosophical insights or emotional breakthroughs. It’s honestly about making small good choices over and over that build up your positive brain chemistry one molecule at a time. This creates a virtuous cycle and things are a tiny bit better. Even when you backslide, the darkness rises up and tries to swallow you, your brain chemistry won’t play ball, you get stuck in painful memories, your circumstances suck, you make bad choices and hate yourself—the more tiny steps upward you’ve made, the harder the depression has to work to drag you all the way back down. Gain all the distance you can one baby step at a time. Every single one of them makes your life materially better, and eventually you will outdistance the darkness by sheer math alone. The tortoise beats the hare every time.

Proud of us for keeping on keeping on. Years from now we'll look back on lives made the richer for the compassion our suffering grew in us, and the material gains our perseverance through it brought us. These men will have the funeral director chiseling off the cheeto dust from their bodies, having utterly wasted their lives and potential because they were too selfish to get help and grow through their mental health challenges.