If your idea of how to be a man leaves you feeling like something’s missing, you are not alone.
Earlier this month, I was with a client, discussing a recent career change and the effect it was having on his creativity, energy, and outlook. But, as important as these things are to him right now, I could tell something else was on his mind. Seemingly out of nowhere, he started talking about how he had never had an adult male model healthy adulthood to him. This was the center of his stress. He felt lost in a world of “winging it” and realized his apathy wasn’t about the job or current relationship – it was about a lack of validation, recognizing the markers of adulthood, and wanting to be known for his authentic self but sensing that this wasn’t enough. In short, he didn’t “know how to be a man, a grown-up, or even what that should look like.”
From an outsider’s perspective, he’s very successful, but it’s been my experience that this is true of most men, myself included. It doesn’t matter if we have the trappings of success – we carry around a stadium of doubts that continually yell at us. I know women experience the things I am writing about here, but men often get under-represented in these discussions. When articles of the week pop up related to women not having a strong role model or having to assert their independence, men will post comments about how articles like those – for, about, and directed mostly at women – don’t reflect their experiences as “people too.” Ironically, in trying to express themselves, men depict their gender as emotionally stunted or worse, “weak”, if they interact with their softer side. Consequently, those comments – online, out loud, however they are expressed – are easily dismissed because they come from – hate to say it – an “angry” place, perpetuating the stereotype of men as socially unwilling or biologically unable to exhibit emotional intelligence.
Men, as much as women, are shamed when they approach life without a filter.
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I think that’s really a key to understanding men. In the same way that women, when they let their guard down for full transparent honesty, are called “too emotional” or “bitches”, men are either “soft” or “angry.” It’s the classic olarity, and of course we lament this even as we sustain it. We want to be understood, but feel ashamed when we do. We want to “be there” for the important people in our lives, but snap at them or diminish them when they do. Men, as much as women, are shamed when they approach life without a filter and no amount of hashtagging can really reach the Namaste we invoke.
A few days later, a friend of mine who is a professor at UCLA and dealing with the pressures of being an adult and raising two children said he felt the same way. He put it like this,
I just find myself in this state of life in a bad place, most negative, and it makes me want to put up walls, excuse my lack of desire to even work on relationships, you know? But [I’m] recognizing that I can actually choose the way that I act, a choice that is born out of staring at my father’s grave and just letting go. Maybe I’m just not making sense, but for me it was important, I think.
Notice how he steps back there in that last sense, almost apologetically? This takes many forms – the woman who punctuates her thoughts with “sorry” or the guy who says, “But, ya know, maybe that’s just me?” We are conditioned to diminish the sharp edges of ourselves for fear of rejection, misunderstanding, or the plea to “calm down.”
Where do we place all of these thoughts and emotions if they are not “safe” or appropriate for our immediate circle of work, relationships, and aspirations? Must we excuse them? One of the things I found myself saying to my client was that it was okay to have them. It’s okay to be disappointed, to articulate and “hear” them, to not always feel the pressure of using those feelings constructively. Sometimes living hurts, and it would actually be more irrational to not acknowledge that, allowing people to silence and shame us, and thereby perpetuate a cycle of abuse. You’re not a “real man” or a “an adult” because you ignore that pain, you’re a healthy individual naming what has to change. Because it has to change. Your physical, emotional, and psychological well-being depends on that. And while you probably already know that, you may not have been given permission to acknowledge it out loud. Not sure how to do that or where to begin?
- Reclaim ownership of your life. So many voices condition us and work us over, contributing to the unsettling feeling that we don’t belong in our own life. Silence them by telling yourself that you deserve a better way of living. If you stay quiet, obedient, and do what those voices – your parent, your partner, your boss, “everybody” – tell you to, you’re practically giving away your life to them.
- Name it. Out loud. Name what the problem is – at first, do this only with yourself. Give a name to what’s on your mind, what memory, event, or current issue is causing you to feel unwelcome in your own life. Talk to yourself – out loud – and drown out whoever is trying to silence you and talk over you.
- Work (it) out. This might mean you go for a walk, go to the gym, or take a night off but the goal is to sort out what you are feeling now that you have a name for the condition. An example might be, “I feel like my life isn’t going anywhere because my job is repetitive and not at all what I want to do” – you’ve named it. But the tumble and rush of feelings you have about that is unrefined. What do you want to say to your boss, your co-workers, your partner? A big part of “working it out” is being able to explain it to someone else. When you ask for something better and answer their question, you will want to be able to say what you are thinking and feeling as well as have a plan worked out of what it will take to resolve things. As a businessperson, I can tell you that when someone comes to me with a problem and a solution, I’m all ears and fully ready to do whatever it takes to help them.
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Last year, I was working with a client who simply was not going to make progress. I knew when we started that it would be unfruitful after a certain point and, sure enough, that’s what happened. I didn’t trust my instinct and I felt obligated to continue with them now that we were in a working relationship. This continued for a while until I finally asked to meet and laid it out for them. Surprisingly, they said they had felt the same way but were also afraid to say anything. Chances are, the people around us, the people we work and share meals with already know things aren’t working. The only thing inhibiting change? Not being able to name it and come up with a solution.
American culture perpetuates two seemingly antagonistic ideas – responsibility for others, without actually caring about them. Is it any wonder that men who are raised to deny and suppress their feelings do not know how to behave in a way that reflects their authentic self or care for others even as they feel the pressure to do both?
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But sometimes even this isn’t enough. Sometimes, the problem isn’t even ours – it’s not our responsibility to work it out. As my UCLA professor friend and I kept talking about what he was going through, he said what was at the root of his problem was that the people he worked with, the other parents he saw at school meetings, people his own age, had “a total lack of desire to listen to people.” That wasn’t the kind of adult he wanted to be. What wore on him was that people are not always nice – probably because we are taught to lock away our true selves. The hard exterior is the only thing people see of us anymore. Sometimes, even when we come up with a name for the problem and a solution to fix it, nobody cares. Or at least they don’t care as much as we do. They’re not emotionally invested enough or they’ve simply got other stuff going on, pulling at their attention, and distracting them. You know what? That’s okay. This is where most of those platitudes by self-titled self-help gurus come to the front. “Let it go” or “Let go, let God” or “Namaste” come into play. It’s frustrating to have a real issue, to try and talk about it with someone important, and they just couldn’t give less of a f**k. What is so frustrating about that is having to accept responsibility for someone else’s negligence.
We don’t yet have a healthy way for men to reconcile that. While I was writing my first Master’s thesis, I paid significant attention to how an “American” identity was formed. It was formed by a high degree of solitude/individuality, lack of concern for others/detachment, yet a high degree of responsibility. This seemed irreconcilable for the longest time to me; American culture perpetuates two seemingly antagonistic ideas – responsibility for others, without actually caring about them. Is it any wonder that men who are raised to deny and suppress their feelings do not know how to behave in a way that reflects their authentic self or care for others even as they feel the pressure to do both? How can we feel responsible for people, tasks, processes with which we never actually interact? Men, under these pressures, either behave badly or choose to detach.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t vaguely aware of their poor behavior, don’t feel the weight of disappointment in themselves, and don’t slide deeper into malaise and depression. Men want to be men – whatever that might mean – and not caring about themselves or their relationships, becoming hard, they intuitively understand, isn’t the way to grow. Acting like we do not care is not, in fact, the same as actually not caring. And without naming this and working through it, the depression, disappointment, anger, and resentment will continue to eat away a life otherwise well lived.
Something that television critics and thousands of bloggers have been discussing in relation to the show Mad Men is the way that Don Draper “stares blankly” at the end of every episode. Life is too much for him. He self-medicates. He hides his true self. He drinks. He lies. He cheats. He is the epitome of a morally bankrupt “adult.” But undeniably, he is hyper-sexualized and glorified, championed as a “real” man. Turning this script in on itself, in the sixth season finale, Don Draper can no longer stand it and he reveals who he truly is – he unloads what he really thinks of his job, he admits the extent of his lies, his daughter catches him cheating on his second wife with a neighbor. He hits “rock bottom.”
That.
That is a real man.
That is a adult.
That is someone who takes a deep breath and actually sees the world instead of staring blankly, someone who begins the hard task of naming what the problem is and starts to either repair what is broken or abandons dead projects and starts over.
Originally published at sexualityandthecity.com.
Photo: jbcurio/Flickr