I’m learning the more you want things, the more likely you end up with nothing.

How strange that we can saw off certain parts of ourselves, so we remain confident in one area, an area that is challenging for others, only to feel completely hopeless in another.

Growing up gay and disabled, I was taught not to want much, to feel grateful for whatever came my way. A live-in boyfriend was above and beyond what I should’ve dared dream for myself. Meanwhile, all around me, straight white guys were taking giant chunks out of life and leaving no leftovers for the rest of us. They see what they want, they get it,

“Sometimes it’s easier to just look at yourself as the fucked-up one because it gives you a pass on doing any work on yourself because like, well, at least you’re self-aware,”

Whenever Gus and I’d discuss our friends in open relationships, we would do it with a sort of judgmental eye-roll like, “Oh, those crazy kids! When will they get their shit together?” I think a part of us secretly prided ourselves on not being That Kind of Gay. We liked conforming to these heteronormative roles of Gus being more of the homemaker

Is that why people stay in relationships? Just so they can have someone to tell their stories to, someone who cares if they got home dead or alive, someone who’s thinking of them first thing in the morning and last at night? I’m not asking as a judgment. It makes complete sense.

Your conscious mind makes a decision not to drink and then sends the memo to your subconscious, which is where years of messaging and brainwashing lives, and your subconscious is like, “Wait, what? But drinking is amazing.

“That’s selfish,” Gus said, tearing up. “That you just—you do this and then you also end things because it’s easier that way. That way you don’t have to deal with what you did to us.”

The tobacco industry is an apt comparison to alcohol. Both are selling a lie perpetuated by capitalism. We’ve been led to believe that alcohol is an elixir, a social lubricant necessary to have fun and relieve anxiety, when we know through experience that drinking actually intensifies shitty feelings,