Here’s Everything Wrong With Me

There was a time in my life when, if someone started getting close to me, I felt the need to warn them.

Not in some dramatic, sit-down confession kind of way. More casually. More disguised. I used humor. I used candor. I used that tone people use when they’re trying to seem comfortable with something they’re not fully comfortable with.

I would let people know—friends, potential partners, people I cared about—that I was battling depression. That I was on medication. That I was in therapy. Sometimes I’d go even further and glorify my insecurities, as if beating them to the punch somehow made me safer.

Here’s everything wrong with me. Do you still want to continue?

At the time, I told myself it was honesty. Like if I didn’t tell them now, I was withholding information. Like I was lying by omission. Like they had a right to know what they were getting into before they invested any more time in me.

Underneath that was a deeper fear: that if they got to know me first, then learned about the depression, the medication, the therapy, the insecurities, they would feel deceived—and then reject me.

Immediate rejection hurts your feelings.

Delayed rejection feels like a verdict.

So I tried to control the timing of pain. Rip the Band-Aid off quickly. Better to know now than later. Better to be dismissed up front than abandoned after hope had time to grow.

Part of this, I think now, came from being gay.

When you grow up with the sense that something central about you will eventually need to be disclosed, it can shape how you see yourself. You learn early that there is “information” about you people may react to. Something hidden. Something that changes how people might see you once they know.

Coming out teaches many things, some beautiful and some complicated. One of the complicated lessons is that identity can feel like a reveal.

Somewhere along the way, I applied that same logic to my mental health. Sexuality, depression, treatment, struggle—it all became part of the same category in my mind: truths that needed to be announced before anyone got too close.

As if closeness required a disclaimer.

I remember former friends using my openness about medication as material for passive-aggressive jokes. “He’s so drugged out.” “He’s a walking pharmacy.” They held onto that moment for a long time afterward, longer than felt casual. I don’t think I let myself feel how much that stung.

But now I see something different. That didn’t prove there was something shameful about me. It proved there was something shallow about them.

The people who truly mattered didn’t recoil. They didn’t weaponize what I shared. They supported me and wanted to understand more. In many cases it strengthened the relationship instead of weakening it.

Which means all that frantic disclosure was solving the wrong problem.

The right people never needed a warning label.

Looking back, I can also see how lopsided it all was. When I listed my flaws, I left out everything good. I presented a résumé of defects — here are my struggles, here are my complications, here are the reasons you may someday regret me — and asked people to judge me at my worst before they had any chance to know me whole.

And after I disclosed, I often felt relief. There. Now you know. Get used to it. It felt like control. But it was mostly false. Disclosure never really protected me from anything. It just made me feel momentarily safer while changing nothing.

I no longer see those parts of myself as damage in the way I once did. They are human struggles. Chapters. Realities. Not disqualifications.

What I really wanted all along was simple: to be human without it canceling me.

I’m still learning that real connection doesn’t begin with confession. And that some things are not emergencies.

Sometimes it begins when you stop handing people reasons to leave before they’ve been given one reason to stay.