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I had a conversation several months ago with my boyfriend about mental illness after a mutual friend of ours wrote a Facebook post about her struggles with depression. Neither of us had really known she struggled to the extent that she divulged there and then, though I knew from my years of friendship with her that it was certainly something she was familiar with. The conversation was mostly stopped at every turn because both of us realized we didn't know what we were talking about. We had not battled mental illness, and so had no real roads out of the conversation aside from what we'd watched our friends go through. We've both been depressed, sure. We're creatives, writers, deep thinkers, empaths. It's more rare for someone of our dispositions not to have these kinds of issues. But I've never felt hopeless, and my boyfriend concurs that neither has he. I've never been at the end of any rope for too long. Like most people, whether they'd like to admit