Learning to accept your true colors

One of the hardest issues I've had to deal with is acceptance. I've come to realize it that somehow it's harder to accept your own "demons" because we've been taught to be perfect. Life is a constant separation between opposites: Good-bad, light-darkness, happy-sad, healthy-sick, and so on...We are taught that we should be on the "good" side of those categories, but what happens when you are faced with living with opposites? Is that possible?
Here's my case. I've always been little miss smiles. I'm always smiling, I constantly laugh. I oftenly tell people about my depression with a smile on my face (which makes it weird, I know). I've always been that way, since I was little, joking around and messing up with people with a happy, cheerful face. That's certainly not compatible with having a depression, or at least what people imagine a depressed person looks like. Or so I thought.
When you are battling a mental condition, you are constantly praying and begging life to make you healthy again, to get well, to be able to be yourself again. You don't want to live like this because you somehow feel your identity was stolen by some monster (Depression in my case) and that you need to kill it in order for you to live again. I used to pray to every Saint available so they will remind God to heal me once for all, I blew every birthday candle wishing for a year with 0 depressive symptoms and I swore to myself every New Year that this would be the last one in which I had to take medications. I believed, truly believed, I couldn't be myself with depression because I was sick. I needed to be healed and life pretty much seamed umbearable if I imagined I had to live with depressive symptoms my whole existance.
But after 5 years of ups and downs, medications, therapy, you start wondering... Is the rest of my life going to be like this? And there you hit a decisive point, it's a question that can either make you or break you. You can cry yourself to sleep, torture your mind with amazing fantasies of a 60-year old version of yourself with a huge name tag that says "I STILL have depression" and you can simply let it ruin your life. Of course, your anxious mind will tell you "You shouldn't have kids if you're ging to be depressed for the rest of your life because it would be unfair to them" and stuff like that which all ends up saying: I'll be depressed for the rest of my life therefore I have no future and I can't do anything because life is for those who are healthy and I will never be healthy so I might just as well start crying now and stop when I turn 95 (If I haven't kill myself before). Not so nice, right? Well, there's another way you can go.
Thanks to my therapist, some ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) books, self-love and a lot of meditation, I realized this: You can live with depression and really live. That means you can still achieve your dreams, fullfil your goals, be yourself WHILE HAVING DEPRESSION. Because it doesn't define you. Yes, it will make the road a little harder and yes you will have to accept yourself with love and gratitude while having nights in which you won't stop crying or days in which getting out of bed seems unthinkable. But you can make it. Depression won't steal your identity because life is about balancing opposites: So you can still be little miss smiley face while having hard days. That doesn't make you a faker or it doesn't make you deny your situation. It just makes you accept it, like one of your many, many, many things: your brown eyes, your big cheeks, your eternal hate for running, your big heart, your intelligence, your depressive moments. This isn't a curse, it's part of your story and it'll give you so much strenght. It'll teach you how to not take anything for granted or how to be more empathic. It's an absolute cliché but sometimes the greatest blessings come in ways we didn't expected. You just have to accept your demons, your shadows, your dark side, and invite them to play with all of the other things that make you who you are.