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I won’t give a name to the condition or disorder I keep alluding to in my writing.

I haven’t even told my parents, siblings or wider family about it yet, and certainly not our children.

In fact, the only people who know are my wife, the close friend I walk with most Saturday mornings and an acquaintance who recognised I have it, because he’s a healthcare professional specialising in an aspect of its treatment.

The friend I opened up to just last year, twelve years into our relationship. Another friend I told in a sort of round about kind of way just on Monday, twenty-two years after we first met.

There’s a good reason for my secrecy. A good reason in my mind anyway. That’s because there’s a vocal type of activitist who have successfully managed to completely misrepresent the condition, describing it in terms which I find completely humiliating.

Now it’s true there are activists of another kind, working hard to clear up misconceptions, representing us as normal men simply in need of proactive interventions. I am grateful for these folk.

Nevertheless, if you were to google the name of this condition, it’s not their considered efforts that you would first come across. It’s the sensationalist stuff which, to me, is both acutely embarrassing and upsetting.

That’s not to say there won’t come a time when I speak about it openly and frankly. After all, I opened up about it on my blog last year, for the first time since diagnosis nearly twenty years ago. So that’s progress of sorts.

Perhaps one day I will join those striving to clear up misconceptions. But for now? No, it’s still too raw for me. Yes, even two decades on. Dealing with it was utterly humiliating for me. That’s honestly how I feel.

Ask me again at sixty.