This is a question I think about a lot too. My life feels like a balance between two starkly opposed worlds: the happy world I entered when I got to Rice University that brims with talent, support, access, and achievement; and the world of mental health problems that I’ve struggled through with medication and therapy and support groups that is filled with loneliness, anxiety, and hopelessness.

In this latter world, everything I’ve seen dovetails exactly with your experience — mindset inequality is the prevailing factor in the crippling effects of difference, no matter it’s source or content. “Buggy” beliefs stick, and the only way to work through them is to find resources to rely on and people to help guide you.

I feel lately like the single most important thing we can do to “level the playing field” is to recognize the fundamental importance of acceptance in creating a healthy emotional life. It doesn’t erase the dependent parents, language barriers, disruptive medications, confusing experiences, or the pain that those things have generated. But finding ways to express to each person, in a way that specific person can hear, that they matter and that their experience is valid, can help them to create the foundation from which their healing work can begin.

The struggle, of course, is to a) identify those needs in a way that is both general enough to be systematized and b) personal enough to actually reach individuals. That’s why I think writing like what you’ve said in this piece is so crucial. There are so many ways that mindset inequality can be created, the most important thing we can do right now is identify them and give public accounts of the experience. Only someone who knows that life can be truly and specifically helpful to someone who needs help with that life, so the more we can articulate our own struggles and find ways to get those stories to people who might be in the same position, the better position we’re all in to help each other.

Change and growth happen one relationship at a time. To create a world that does better than the one we have now, we have to build the tools that help us find ourselves and each other. Thank you for sharing your story, and for helping the rest of us accept our own.