A Letter to Younger Me

Dear 10-year-old me,

I know you’re still trying to figure out what kind of man you’re supposed to become. More so because it has been a year since you were sent to an all-boys boarding school and everything you know about ‘being a man’, you will learn from here. But you have also been raised by a single mother, and you can already feel the tension that it comes with, in the way people look at the two of you, the way their questions have hidden insults inside them.

Here’s what I wish someone had told you: your biggest enemies will be your own kind. The men.

Not all of them, of course. Like the inimitable Hannah Gadsby said, “Not all men, okay? Of course it’s not all men. It’s never all men. Mostly, it is the men using that hashtag.”

But there will be enough of such men. You’ll meet them everywhere: in classrooms, in offices, in bars, on WhatsApp groups that begin as friendship and end as a parade of screenshots and sexist jokes. They’ll invite you in with laughter and beer, with brotherhood and belonging. And before you realise it, they’ll start teaching you the rules of being a “real man.”

They’ll tell you not to cry, even when your throat burns with it. They’ll say women like confidence, but they’ll mean arrogance. They’ll laugh when you talk about love and call it weakness. When you confide in them about being rejected by your crush, their advice will be ‘ignore her and watch her come running to you with her tail between her legs.”

And because you’ll want to belong, you’ll listen. For a while. You’ll try to model yourself on older men who seem powerful. The boss who flirts shamelessly with interns, the uncle who thinks his wife is furniture, the actor who turns violence into charisma. You’ll mistake fear for respect. You’ll think power equals manhood.

You’ll be wrong.

Because one day, you’ll see the same behaviour up close, from a stepfather who confuses authority with abuse. You’ll hear the shouting, the control, the cruelty, and a part of you will want to shout back. Another part, the dangerous one, will want to *become* that power, just to never be powerless again.

That’s the moment you’ll have to start fighting. Not him, not your mother, but yourself.

You’ll have to learn that love isn’t obedience and that control isn’t strength. You’ll have to stop yourself from becoming the man who scared you as a child. And some days, you won’t succeed. You’ll raise your voice, you’ll clench your fists, and you’ll see that shadow flicker in your reflection. You’ll hate yourself for it. That hatred will save you.

As you grow older, the battlefield will change shape. You’ll join workplaces where men your age whisper about female colleagues in “locker-room” tones. Superiors at work that you look up to will ‘rate’ female colleagues based on their bodies. Others will boast about their ‘body count’. Your peers will call you up at 2 in the morning, drunk, to ask the name and number of your female intern that they met during work.

Refusing won’t be easy. But even when you can’t refuse, resist. Don’t be part of those conversations. Don’t let them see you as an ally. Hang up the phone. Call out their comments.

They’ll call you things. Simp. Woke. Feminist. Closet gay.

You’ll smile through it, but each label will sting in its own way. They’ll mock your boundaries because they don’t have any. They’ll test your patience because you threaten their comfort. You’ll become the “buzzkill” in conversations where women are reduced to stories.

And here’s the part that’ll exhaust you: the fight isn’t one big confrontation. It’s a thousand small ones. Every joke you don’t laugh at. Every silence you break. Every friend you lose because you said, “That’s not okay.” There will be 50-year-old men who will tell you to ‘get a wife’ when you tell them you do the laundry and dishes every day. There will be 17-year-olds who will ask you to grow a beard so that you can ‘look like a stud and make all the girls fall flat’.

It’ll feel like erosion. But stay with it. Because that’s how you build yourself.

And the biggest allies you shall ever meet will be the women in your life.

They’ll arrive in your life disguised as friends, teachers, mentors, colleagues, each one sharpening your conscience a little more. They’ll correct you when you’re wrong, forgive you when you learn, and pull you back when you drift toward the noise of the herd. They’ll teach you how to listen without defending, how to comfort without rescuing, how to respect without pedestalizing. They’ll make you laugh harder and think deeper than most men ever will. And in their company, you’ll discover that feminism isn’t a threat to masculinity; it’s the antidote to its worst versions.

And you’ll realise that kindness is not a feminine trait. It’s a human one.

The world won’t make it easy. It will test your conviction daily. You’ll have to explain, over and over, why you won’t join in the gossip, why you refuse to call women “distractions,” why you treat your female colleagues as equals instead of audience.

But the older you get, the easier it becomes. They’ll mock you because you’re proof that “being a man” is not about being a douchebag, and that terrifies them. But by the time you hit your late 30s, you will be able to see the ten-year-old kid in them, still begging for their toxic father’s approval. And you will learn to forgive them instead of hating them. You will learn to be gentler in your refusal to take part in their rituals. You will remind the Andrew Tate fanboy that the ‘women’ mentioned in his role model’s sermons also include his mother and sister.

Over time, you’ll find your tribe of men who are trying to unlearn, who are tired of pretending, who carry empathy like a quiet rebellion. You’ll build friendships with them that feel like shelter. But your real strength will still come from the women who believed in you when you were still figuring yourself out.

When that happens, you’ll feel something close to peace. You’ll realise you never had to choose between being a man and being a good person. The world told you those were different things. It lied.

So, little buddy, it’s going to be a long fight. But one day, when you see a younger man laugh at the wrong joke and then stop himself because of something you said years ago, you’ll know it was worth it.

With lots of love,
Older You.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.