It wasn’t until I got back to my apartment and opened the bottle of pills that reality began to set in. Not only was I committing to a new monthly expense, but I was also signing up to take a pill every day, a lifestyle change that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

My first few weeks on PrEP, I felt fine. Every morning at 8 a.m. my cellphone chimed with a reminder for me to take my pill. I even began to develop a subtle sense of pride in knowing that although I was having sex only with my partner, I was upholding my word to my parents.

But as the one-month mark approached, I began to have serious doubts about why I was taking PrEP. After all, I wasn’t having sex with men other than my partner; same for him. We still used condoms, despite having been together for several years.

I recognize that PrEP is effective and agree that it should be available to people who want to take it. But after about a month of taking it off and on, I just stopped. I couldn’t get over the psychological barrier that somehow I was weakening my body by training myself to rely on pills. Instead, my partner and I decided to take the precautions we’re comfortable with.

There are also cultural reasons for why I abandoned the drug. Like many other people from low-income families in the rural South, I didn’t grow up understanding that drugs could prevent sicknesses. The only people who took medicine around me were those who were already ill. Instead, bleach was our anti-pathogenic weapon. And because my parents contracted H.I.V. before our understanding of the virus evolved to what it is today, a hospice nurse bleached everything in our house at least once a day.

As sad and ignorant as that may seem, losing my parents to AIDS has instilled in me a deep skepticism of doctors, medicine and even hospitals. And while this is rooted in my own experience, studies show that blacks still hold deep suspicions about the health care industry and we report higher instances of racial bias at doctors’ offices than other groups. The Tuskegee trials, where federal researchers followed African-American men infected with syphilis and withheld treatment so that they could see the disease take its course, and other racist medical experiments, have left a long shadow.