Your Shame Thinks It’s Keeping You Safe
Why gay men mistake self-attack for self-protection
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 early that good things come with conditions, that acceptance has expiration dates, that showing up fully gets you erased. So shame embedded itself as our forecasting sys…