For the past three years, I have had the privilege of delivering the following monologue in my university’s production of The Coming Out Monologues. I wrote it from my own experiences, and, while the words and sentiments below no longer apply to me or my life, I am still overwhelmed with sadness when I remember just how terrifyingly real they once were.

After every show (every show), I had people — strangers — come up to me with puffy eyes and wet faces, thanking me for speaking. Each told me, in different words, that my story was their story too. In those moments, we were both reminded of a small truth: that no matter what we feel, we are not alone. There was, for me and for each of them, a small glimpse of beauty in such a heartbreaking connection.

This is the first year that I won’t get the chance to stand in front of a crowd of people and choke back my own tears as I recite these words. They’re not the most eloquent or poetic, but they point to an authenticity that I will never, ever be able to articulate, much less articulate well. It haunts me that this was once real in my life, and it destroys me that it’s true for others.

I long for and hope for and work for a day when this is no-one’s story.

———

They make me feel less.

I don’t feel happy, I don’t feel sad, and those tiny little blue pills sure don’t solve any problems.

I shouldn’t be taking them. I shouldn’t be putting my body through this. Fucking with brain chemistry is a fucking big deal, but none of that matters because the pills keep me from doing the one thing that I really, really want to do.

I want to put a period at the end of a sentence.

That’s all I want to do. Seems simple, but that’s the way these pills make me feel. They make me feel less. They make it so that I have to talk about myself in inane metaphors so that I can make any sense. A period at the end of a sentence!

That “period” at the end of that “sentence”? I’m talking about fucking suicide here. I just wish I could let myself do that. The period is a finality, it’s an end, and the sentence isn’t a string of words, it’s a fucking death sentence that makes the period at the end completely inevitable.

Yet I can’t come right out and say that. I can’t say, “I tried to take my own miserable life, and the only part of that that concerns me is the fact that I’m now chemically prohibited from getting up the nerve to do so again.”

So my “sentence”, right? The one that ends in that poignant period?

“I’m gay.”

Period.

It’s as simple as that: two easy words, but what’s my context? It’s that I’m a suicidally-depressed, closeted gay guy trying to fit into a world that doesn’t want me around.

Now, of course, I’m not actually suicidal. Not anymore anyway. Now I’m just a ghost, as two pills a day have taken away every ability to feel happy, sad, excited, angry, perturbed, aroused, or even hopeful.

So I guess it did work.

I wanted to end my life, and here I am without one, drifting along from hour to hour and wondering why I can’t be compelled to give a damn about anyone or anything including myself. And, unfortunately, to prolong that inane metaphor, these pills are a comma, not a period. They don’t stop anything, they just drag out nothingness — that fucking emptiness of existence that comes when you find out that not only does nobody give a damn about you or your life, but that they would rather you be removed from it. That you’re so scumsuckingly low, so virulently immoral, so passionately hated by God Himself that your lungs don’t deserve the air rapidly pumping into them as you cry your stifled sobs.

That’s the sentence. That’s what it feels like to know, in the grand scheme of things, you’re just a typo.

A typo. In a sentence. With a period.

The grievous errors in your creation overshadow anything that you could have become or meant, and you’re condemned to either live life as an abnormal aberration or put a stop to life altogether.

So, let’s hear it for those pills: little milligrams that keep me emotionally comatose and ineffectually existing from day to day. Alleviating everything, but solving nothing.

Doing nothing to fix any part of that that one, small, fucked up sentence:

“I’m gay.”

Period.