I've only tried to commit suicide four times.

Now, I understand that the definition of "tried to commit suicide" may vary from person to person- but let's just say that I've come relatively close.

Okay, okay, fine. Let me revise that.

I've come close to committing suicide four times.

But I think that I've had good reason to attempt it each time. The only reason I haven't done it yet is not that someone has found me and stopped me- I don't want to even imagine how awkward that would be- it's that I have been too much of a coward and simply wimp out before I can actually do it.

Actually, I'm a coward about a lot of things. The biggest thing I am a coward about would have to be... I mean if I had to pick... then I suppose it would be my sexuality.

(Or lack there of, at this point.)

Girls are just nasty.

... Okay. That's fucked up. That's not what I meant, exactly.

Don't get me wrong. Women have beautiful bodies and if I could surround my self with good female friends, I would... But...

But thinking about being with a woman sexually just makes me more flaccid than before I even started the whole thought process.

I've tried. Believe me, I've tried rising to the occasion (if you know what I mean) but I just end up nauseous and more often than not, crying. It's just not worth it.

And picturing guys that way is just terrifying. I try to the best of my abilities to not feel aroused by men (but sometimes I slip up every once in a while) because being a part of that lifestyle, that "sick, embarrassing, repulsive" lifestyle, as my father so kindly puts it, just isn't an option.

My dad would disown me. He would look at me like I was nothing. Like I was just gum under his shoe or- or- I don't even know what.

Or he might hit me. I mean, my dad, Burt, is most certainly not abusive or anything, thank the Lord-I-don't-believe-in. But there was that one time he caught me singing along to "Defying Gravity" alone in my room and just lost his temper...

But that's in the past. Besides, I don't sing anymore anyways, so it's no big deal.

After my mom died, my dad was so unhappy, I just... I just couldn't- can't- bear disappointing him. I don't want him to hurt like that ever again.

But I mainly fear being exiled from my own family.

Which bring me to another reason why I'm a coward.

It's just... For as long I can remember, I've wanted to sing on Broadway.

Or teach a singing class.

Or sing anywhere, really.

But my voice is so goddamn high pitched. That same night my dad caught me singing "Defying Gravity" was the night I just stopped using my natural voice. Sure, deepening my voice gets annoying sometimes (all the time) and my throat gets sore more often than I'd like, but it just makes things easier. Safer. No need to draw any unnecessary attention to myself, right?

But I miss singing. More importantly, I miss the freedom and undiluted joy that comes along with belting out music and feeling the melody vibrate within my throat.

I haven't sung in... Well, I'm 26 years old. So that would make it 14 years.

Jesus, I haven't sung in almost half of my life... I'm not sure if I should be proud of my own self-discipline or just depressed by how profoundly pathetic I am.

I mean its not like I wasn't presented with viable options.

I wanted to join my high school glee club. I wanted to join it more than anything. But the New Directions were all about discovering yourself and sharing it with others and I just couldn't (can't) afford to be myself. It would ruin everything.

And it's just not fair. My stepbrother Finn got to be a member and nobody batted an eye. (At least, not in the way people would bat their eyes at me.) He's got masculine written all over him. He joins the club, and he's a sensitive, confident, heterosexual man who's comfortable enough in his own skin to do what he loves.

I join the club, and I'm a faggot. To put it nicely.

Why sing with a voice that isn't mine, wearing a style of clothing that isn't mine, to express feelings that aren't mine while I "celebrate my individuality"?

So I just didn't bother joining in the first place.

What was I originally talking about?

Oh right. Suicide.

The first time I tried to commit suicide was when I was fourteen and finally realized that I was gay. It was on a Friday, and I had snuck into my dad's room while he was at the garage and grabbed a Hustler magazine from the stack I knew he hid in the back of his closet.

I flipped through page after page for nearly an hour, trying to get aroused by the variety of women, trying to contradict my newfound discovery, but I just couldn't do it.

Long after I had started crying so hard my head felt like it would crack in half, I went to the kitchen to fill a glass with water and grab some of the strong sleeping pills my dad bought after my mom had died.

For reasons I can't explain, once my fingers closed around the bottle, I started thinking about the guys changing in the locker room earlier that day after PE at school. I thought about the sweat gliding down everyone's chest and how difficult it was to look away and how quickly I had had to turn around to hide my heated face (and growing bulge) before anyone saw...

It wasn't even a second later that I twisted the cap off and dumped at least a dozen and a half pills into my mouth.

My tongue suddenly felt dryer than the Sahara desert so I reached for my cup and slowly poured water past my lips. I remember that I trembled as I felt the liquid trickle between each pill as I let one ease down my throat. It seemed to take an eternity and even though my head was tilted upwards, I couldn't see the ceiling through the new onslaught of tears.

Soon enough I swallowed every single one.

Shaking harder than ever, I screwed the cap back on, and put the bottle away. Then I walked to my room, and moved the magazine back in its hiding place in my dad's closet. I went and sat on my bed for a good fifteen minutes, clenching and unclenching the sheets, staring at my wall, before the panic began to set in.

I leaped off the bed and stumbled to the bathroom down the hall. I skidded on my knees in front of the toilet, shoved three fingers down my throat, and ended up puking my guts out until it got dark outside.

I was asleep by the time my dad got home and the only side effect was that I woke up past noon the next day.

The second time I tried to commit suicide was the night my dad and Finn's mom, Carole, got married. All day I had to sit through a wedding that had been planned by a professional wedding planner even though it was secretly my dream to put together my dad's wedding. The ceremony reminded me that if I were to have a wedding of my own with another guy, my dad wouldn't even bother showing up, he be so ashamed. I had watched all these couples slow dancing at the reception, Finn with Rachel, Mike with Tina, Brittany with Artie, Sam with Quinn, and knew that I could never do that with a person that I loved. And then I hated myself even more for being so self-absorbed that I was unable to able to feel truly happy for my dad.

I eventually snuck into the empty kitchens in the building we were in and stole a knife before I locked myself in a handicapped bathroom because it was an individual room in which I could be alone. I removed my jacket and pushed up my sleeves and proceeded to cut up my arms like a Thanksgiving turkey. (Okay so maybe that's an exaggeration.) After a while I just rocked on the floor for nearly twenty minutes with the knife clenched tightly my fist, waiting for the moment when I manned up enough to make the fatal cuts. But every time I got too close to my wrist and the veins I could see through my papery skin, bile would rise up my throat and my hand would freeze.

After about another ten minutes of cutting carefully around the veins, panic flooded throughout my body again in a flash and I threw the knife on the counter. I stuck my arms under the sink for a few minutes and had to hold paper towels against my cuts for another ten minutes before the bleeding even sort of slowed.

I rinsed the knife off while angry, humiliated tears streamed down my face. I wrapped the bloody tissues in clean tissues to conceal them in the trash can and rolled my sleeves back down and buttoned the cuffs.

I could see faint red lines appearing in the white of my shirt from the cuts that hadn't stopped bleeding yet so I just threw my coat on top and hid everything.

I eventually returned the knife to the kitchen, but when I went back to the big room in which everyone was still enjoying themselves, I collapsed into a chair, too weak to stand up for very much longer, and remained there the rest of the night.

No one had even noticed I was gone.

I threw the ruined shirt away in the trash bin outside once I got home.

The third time I came close to committing suicide was after Finn's glee club won Nationals. Burt, Carole, Finn, and I went out to Breadstix to celebrate once Finn came home from the competition held in New York (my dream city).

All I could think about was my dad slapping me while Wicked lyrics echoed in the background.

How could he look at Finn with pride in his eyes for singing and dancing on a stage in front of all those people, when he told me that I was a faggot for singing in my own room?

So I asked him when we got home. Finn had gone to Rachel's house and Carole was getting ready for bed.

I didn't have friends to hang with. We were alone in the living room.

"He was in that club before I met Carole. I got no right to tell him to quit now."

"I wasn't asking you to tell him to quit!"

"Don't raise your voice at me!"

"So it's okay for him to sing and not me?"

He knew what I was talking about.

"You were singing a woman's song with that ridiculous, girly voice of yours, what was I supposed to do? It's too late to teach Finn but he has proved himself a good guy. At the time, I was worried you were a bit light in the loafers but I guess you were just late with puberty... Your voice is deeper now and you've turned out okay. I nipped it in the bud... Plus Finn won out of all those other schools. He's bringing honor to the Hummel-Hudson name."

Okay.

Finn was 'good' and I was only 'okay.'

And that's when I realized that all of this crap I was doing to make him proud of me- to make him see me as an equal- was always gonna leave me just below Finn in his eyes. I could continue to lower my voice and dress like Finn and watch football with them and work on cars at the shop and suck my lips in a little to hide their fullness all I wanted (which I didn't) but I would always be sub-par to the quintessence of the All-American-Boy, Finn Hudson.

I can only bring 'honor to the Hummel-Hudson name' if I bring home a fucking trophy.

Later that night I went for the pills again. And like the first time, the capsules, along with the contents of my stomach, ended up in the toilet.

And the next day life continued the same as always.

The most recent time I tried to kill myself was the first time I had sex with a girl.

If you could even call it that.

It was in my sophomore year of college during spring break. I had ended up going to OSU with Finn as per dad's orders to get a degree in mechanical engineering because the one time I even suggested going to college in New York, my dad looked so horrified I couldn't even finish my argument. (Rachel ended up going to college in New York and somehow she and Finn had/has managed to make the long distance thing work) Finn was my only good friend and I just followed him wherever he wanted to go whenever I wasn't in my room hiding behind books for subjects I had absolutely no interest in. We were at a party for someone I didn't know in a building in Columbus and I downed beer after beer until my vision was blurry and I could barely walk in a straight line.

Some girl (whose giant boobs I remember better than her face) dragged me into a room down the hall of the apartment we were in. And I followed her willingly because I had to try to make things right. My drunk logic convinced me that if I screwed her it would somehow make me straight because guys seem to love sex and if sex was good with girls then I could at least pretend to be straight for rest of my life.

Only it wasn't.

I thought of naked guys to at least get it up enough to give it a go but I wasn't turned on by her and I was just uncomfortable and I ended up faking an orgasm and throwing away the condom before she could see that it was actually empty.

She was probably too drunk to tell either way.

Once she left to join the party again, I stayed behind and crawled out the window onto the fire escape. I walked straight to the edge and climbed over, my heels slotting between the bars, so that I faced away from the building, still hanging on with my hands.

It seemed like a pretty good way to go. That feeling of flying before it all ended. It was so dark that no one would even see me drop until it was too late.

I stared at the cars driving past below and wondered about what death itself felt like.

The tears on my cheeks were too hot and the wind dried up the salt water tracks almost as soon as they appeared, making my skin unpleasantly tight. But I couldn't wipe them away without letting go of the railing.

In the end, that's what I blamed it on.

After another twenty minutes I got so frustrated with my tears (ironically eliciting more) and my arms were shaking from holding on so long and so tightly, that I hauled myself over again and dropped unceremoniously to the metal floor. I scrubbed my face furiously to the point where my skin turn red and raw and I sat there for what felt like hours until Finn called me to tell me that one of his friends was gonna give us a ride home.

And when I finally got back to my room at four in the morning, I had never loathed myself more. That was the fourth fucking time I was too much of a coward do anything other than complain about the shitty life I had chosen to live. Am still living.

Anyways, after college, Finn and I moved into an apartment together as roommates/brothers. And we stayed there together, working in the shop with my dad for years.

Like I said, I'm 26 now. And I haven't tried anything as drastic as suicide in seven years.

I think that after the fourth failure I just realized that that schtick was getting old. The more I think about it the more I realize that they were just pitiful semi-attempts that don't mean anything. Clearly I can't do it, so what's the point in getting all worked up over things I can't change?

Doesn't mean I'm not disgusted with myself. Doesn't mean I don't hate my father for reducing me to piece of shit I am today. Doesn't mean I don't secretly resent Finn for always being the favorite, despite how much I've grown to love him as my brother...

Doesn't mean that I'm not pathetic enough to actually have nothing better to do than to think about all of this as I'm getting ready for work this morning.

"Come on, Kurt, we're gonna be late! You know how Dad gets when we're late!" Finn shouts from outside my door.

"I'm coming!" I yell back.

I plaster that fake smile on my face, the grin I've used so often that sometimes I mistake it for my genuine one, and head out to my dead-end job at Hummel's Tires and Lube.