Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Blue

A clergyman admitting he was "on the edge of a nervous breakdown" before landing on the plain, declarative "I was gay" is less a confession than a pressure release valve. Lionel Blue isn’t dressing this up in theology or euphemism. He gives you the psychological weather first - "open", "edge", "perplexed" - words that signal vulnerability but also restraint, as if he’s describing symptoms rather than a self. Then the final sentence arrives like a snapped cord: simple grammar, no qualifiers, no apology. After the turbulence, the certainty reads almost radical.

The intent is double-edged. Blue names the internal chaos created when identity and institution collide, and he quietly indicts the conditions that made his sexuality feel like a breakdown waiting to happen. "Perplexed" is doing heavy work: it’s not just confusion, it’s the cultivated bewilderment that comes from living in a culture (and clergy culture in particular) that insists your desire must be explained away, cured, or kept private. His phrasing suggests a person trying to be reasonable about something that was treated as unreasonable.

Context matters: Blue was a prominent British rabbi and broadcaster, speaking from inside religious authority rather than as an outside critic. That position sharpens the subtext. He’s not merely narrating a personal awakening; he’s exposing the psychic cost of spiritual communities that preach compassion while teaching certain people to mistrust their own bodies. The finality of "I was gay" refuses the idea that faith requires self-erasure, and it does so with the understated force of someone who’s done being translated.