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Here’s me, soaked for two days in vinegar, the rubber egg experiment, my ribcage collapsed, my heart exposed.

The eggheads invented the terms “invasive thoughts” and “suicidal ideation,” which were just words to me, identified to compartmentalize, for the betterment of us all.

But to hear those words from a loved one, and then another, carefully pronounced, turned like a Rubik’s cube, to hear talk of medication and titration, I have never felt so helplessly “etherised upon a table.”

My heart has rubberized. I can’t say anything inspirational about Buddhist meditations on mortality, not now, because it’s too easy to let your hand slip at the wheel, or to step in front of a train, and call it invasive thoughts and low impulse control and suicidal ideation. Who can grieve a misfired neuron?

It is too easy to die, too easy for medicine to become poison, for Bacchanalian nights to lead to alcoholic rock bottoms, for physical exercise to lead to body dysmorphia, and for every manner of game to ossify into addiction. The truth at all costs is no longer a virtue. It is too easily reduced to information without context, gamified, and made into addictive brain candy.

Let’s reboot the Noble Lie, not as a lever to impose a class system, but to get everyone to cheer the fuck up. Lie to me and to your neighbor, be opaque, speak in riddles, laugh when it hurts, blow all the sunshine you can muster.

And let me feel good when I promise that things will be okay.