Your Shame Thinks It’s Keeping You Safe
Why gay men mistake self-attack for self-protection
Gino Cosme is a gay therapist with over a decade of clinical work with gay men. This is Unfiltered Clarity, a weekly essay on the patterns gay men live but rarely name.
The promotion came through on a Tuesday.
Not the “we’ll see” kind. The actual thing. More money. Better title. My boss used words like “exceptional” and “well-deserved.” I thanked him. Smiled. Said the right things.
Then I walked back to my desk and my brain started its work.
They’ll realize they made a mistake. Someone will notice I’m not actually that good. This just means higher expectations I can’t meet. More visibility. More chances to mess it up. I’ll disappoint them and prove I never deserved this in the first place.
Ten minutes. That’s how long the good feeling lasted before shame showed up doing what it does best: running predictions.
Not celebrating my win. Calculating all the ways it would get taken away.
Gay men are brilliant at this particular math. We learned e…