I was 16 years old when Craig Ferguson hit the airwaves on The Late Late Show. His first show was January 3, 2005, 1 year to the day after I had attempted suicide, and 6 months into a new high school in a new state. Craig was visibly nervous, though he was still much looser than the other hosts I’d watched late into weeknights; Anything to avoid sleep, because sleep simply resulted in me waking up to another unbearable day of high school. I was hardly functioning. Craig was an underdog for me to root for, an outcast on a show I’d only scoffed at during brief flips through the channels. He was different, though it wasn’t exactly clear why at the beginning: he tried to fit into the late-night format at first.

It was barely over a year later when, as I was celebrating my early escape from high school, Craig stepped onto the stage and eulogized his father. Watching him from my parents’ living room in the dark of the sleeping house, I didn’t breathe as he worked his way through a monologue that was uncomfortable, painful, and disturbing. It was all those things because I suddenly felt like I might know this man I’d been watching rather mindlessly every night for a year. I felt as though I had received an ultimatum from Craig himself: get on board, or get out. This shit’s for real.

I got on board, and I made a personal investment in him. It was my first investment in anything for the past 2 years. The nature of suicide is that it is most often done out of a desire to be closer to someone or anyone. People who kill themselves tend to be incredibly sensitive to what others think of them. They are often very good at hiding this fact about themselves. That’s why I swallowed all the pain medication and Excedrin I could one night in January during my sophomore year in high school. I didn’t want to disappoint anyone anymore. I wanted people to think I was a good and kind person. My standards were and are too high, so high that I still torture myself over not wearing a hat my sister gave me on Christmas when I was eleven.

We had given each other gifts in the morning while going through stockings. She was excited to give me a St. Louis Rams hat, because I loved the Rams, and I always wore a hat. But the hat wasn’t right. I can’t remember why—it didn’t fit right, or the crest was too big, or the bill looked funny, or I was just more attached to my other hat. Regardless of the reason, when we headed out the door to go to my Aunt and Uncle’s for Christmas lunch, I was wearing my old hat. I can’t ever forget the look on my sister’s face when she asked why I wasn’t wearing her hat. I cried for a week straight about that look, and I can’t help crying every time I think about it.

When I told her about this recently, apologizing profusely, she simply looked confused. She couldn’t even recall the hat. Or so she says. Because of my neurosis, I am certain that she is lying. Except probably not. Except she totally is. So I dove into those pills like they were going to cure me, like they were going to cure what I thought was wrong with my family. But they did the opposite.

When Craig talked about his father, I had just graduated a semester early from my high school in Indianapolis. I had made several very close friends that I loved very much. Or, at least, I loved them, and they were close to me. I wasn’t close to them. They knew nothing about me, because I had invented a whole new past and persona for myself: troubled teen forced to relocate because his parents were concerned about his alcohol and drug habits and the death of his closest friend. I made up stories about my past to avoid anyone judging me for never having experienced anything. I was good at it: people believed and liked me. So I kept doing it. My friends believed any lie I told them about my past or present self because they thought they were trading me their intimacy for mine. But I couldn’t return the gift. I was terrified they wouldn’t like me. I fed them a version of myself they could approve of, be entertained by. But the lies got tangled, and I grew tired of maintaining them. I stopped talking to them. I started watching Craig.

I talk about Craig with his first name because there is a strange familiarity that comes with watching someone on a daily basis. And Craig is personal, familiar. There is only the thinnest of formats—he doesn’t stand rigidly to deliver carefully scripted jokes. It felt like he was talking to me. Sometimes I wonder if this is how people felt with Johnny Carson. Somehow, I doubt it. Johnny was charismatic and funny, but he was far from personable. Craig made me feel like he was talking to me. And I didn’t have to pretend for him. I was safe. I could sit there with the TV glow flickering around the room and lower my guard.

It was, strangely, little more than a year after his father’s eulogy when Craig gave another landmark monologue. He opened up about the anniversary of the last drink he had, and told stories about his wild benders and some of his low points. He talked about his own brush with suicide. He did this to explain why he wasn’t going to make any jokes about Britney Spears, who had just shaved her head and gone on some sort of bender of her own. Craig didn’t feel right about poking fun at someone vulnerable and confessed to his own “aim [having] been off lately.” I watched him deliver this monologue, again, in speechless silence, this time from the dorm room I shared with a now-sleeping cokehead. I’d been dating several girls at once during my first semester, thinking I was finally shaking off the stigma of high school.

But Craig had slapped me upside the head with his monologue. I was only feeding the monster in a different way. Seeing multiple girls at a time only allowed me an excuse to keep lying to each of them. It kept my addiction to distance alive. In addition, the friends I was making weren’t people I even liked; they were people I wanted and needed to impress; people like my druggie/idiot roommate. But I knew people I liked: Jared, from down the hall, who loved to talk about Star Trek (I didn’t care about Star Trek. I’d never watched an episode. But I was impressed by his willingness to admit his embarrassing obsession); Steven, the bearded ginger who almost always shook with silent laughter; Adam, the White Sox fan who had made it his goal to poop in every bathroom in our hall by the end of the semester. These were people I liked.

So, after Craig’s monologue, I stopped interacting with the people I didn’t like and started to drag this new group around with me. Before long, it became natural to be goofy and silly and unapologetic about our quirks. Jared liked Star Trek, I liked Harry Potter, Steven liked… (Pokemon? Video games? Jokes about Christmas? Movie murder montages?) … and Adam liked pooping. We played Wii bowling and Mario Kart while we talked about silly and serious things. We became family.

A little more than a year later and an ocean away, I was studying abroad in London when Craig eulogized his mother. I didn’t have internet or television access in my dorm room, so I went to a computer lab on campus and watched it on YouTube. In the video, Craig almost seems disgusted with his situation, that he’s back here again, that he has to do this. He looks angry with himself that this situation has arisen yet again.

These are not the only moments of Craig Ferguson’s show worth watching. There was the week with Corky, the “recession puppet” who was really just a tennis ball on a stick. There was the endless flirting with beautiful and witty women. There was the development and realization of Geoff Peterson, the gay skeleton robot sidekick. There was the slightly-obnoxious-beginnings of Secretariat before he (she?) became a staple, part of the family. There are lines I can never forget that likely no one else will ever remember: “I enjoy the simple pleasures of Daffy Dook,” “We go from hotel to hotel, across the world. Restless! Always moving, always moving,” “YOUR MOUSE IS JUST LIKE ANY OTHER MOUSE!”

I am sure it must serve as some consternation to Craig that the most prominent compliments that have been paid to his show over the years always concern those emotionally wrought moments. Even now, the day after he has announced his departure from the show, every article references these moments. But perhaps he can take some comfort in the same thing I have come to know: the moments worth remembering are the moments in which we reveal ourselves to other; the moments when we are splayed open before someone and have to say here I am. These moments are rare, even for the bravest among us.

I am not among that number. I am not cured. What once haunted me will always haunt me. I will always struggle against being a closed tap; shut off, a small drop occasionally given to only a few people. But I am fighting, and I am 10 years into the struggle that started the day Craig started the The Late Late Show. I am fighting, and I don’t know how to tell him thank you.