I’m in a 12-step program having never used alcohol or drugs. I’m in a 12-step program having never been a sex or porn addict. I’m in a 12-step program having always believed in a higher power and in the idea that I am not in control of outcomes. I am…

“I don’t mean to speak for anyone else, but I’ve been a man for 34 years now and I think I know a bit about how men think.” “I’ve been a man for 34 years.” I sat with those words that were just a few seconds in a conversation that…

To be humane, to be anti-racist, to see people as our equals is to know that if we shed our skins, there is no easy way to tell us apart without a degree in forensic anthropology. Shed of our skins, our shared nature comes through. I’ve written before about the…

I was mocked relentlessly for being gay while growing up, even though I wasn’t out. I was a very naive child so I didn’t even know I was gay. until other people started calling me “homo” and “fag” and I tried to figure out what those words meant. Then I…

My contribution today to my healing and to our shared experience is to write even though my chest feels heavy and my mind feels uncertain and I don’t know exactly what I want to say and I don’t want to be writing at all because it feels stupid and repetitive…

“Only you can validate yourself,” says the group therapist to a member of the support group who has just shared that he feels unworthy. She looks at him and asks insistently: “Can you say: ‘I am worthy’, ‘I am enough’?” He responds that he cannot right now. …

I’m sitting in a circle of white faces. I hate saying that because race shouldn’t matter, but it does, so I have to say it. The only other ethnic minority in the group is the therapist, who is a woman of Chinese descent. We’re discussing the training she went to…

I can’t imagine I’m the world’s loneliest man, though at times I feel like I am. I’d like to believe I’m not the world’s most wholistically unattractive man, though, from my sent-messages-to-response-rate ratio of 100-to-1, I might actually be. …