Gino Cosme is a gay psychotherapist 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 Zoom call had gone forty minutes over. My colleague, warm and genuinely curious, asked how I was feeling about the move to Lisbon.
I heard myself answer before I’d decided to.
“Yeah, really good about it. Excited. It’ll be great.”
I was mid-sentence when I caught it.
The performance had already loaded, already started playing.
The words were true in the way that true-ish things are true; somewhere in the general vicinity of my actual experience.
But there was a layer underneath I hadn’t checked before speaking. Something about exhaustion. The specific grief of leaving a city I hadn’t expected to love. The feeling, which I hadn’t named to myself, of not being entirely sure what I was moving toward.
None of that made it out. My mouth got there first.
I finished the sentence. We moved on.