TRANSCRIPT
I’ve had a few people recently ask if I could make a video on what it means to really be a man, to be a healthy man. I’m just going to riff off the top of my head on what I think about what it means to be a man, a man in our crazy modern world, but just a man in general. A man, yeah.
Anything I’m going to share here comes from very hard-won knowledge because I was not raised to be a healthy man. I was raised to be a very confused, screwed-up, shut-down, lost guy. For that reason, when I physically became a man in my early 20s, I did not feel like a man. I felt, at best, like a confused boy.
And so I changed. I profoundly changed my life, and the transformation came through getting away from my screwed-up family system, grieving, or doing my best to grieve the awful, disrespecting things they did to me, the violations and the traumas, and learning how to love and honor myself. You know what? That took a lot of masculine energy to do that, a lot of feminine energy too— all this compassion for myself and being open to the truth of the real me, and honoring myself and loving myself in an unconditional way.
I think that feminine energy is actually part of really becoming a man, but it also took a lot of masculine energy. It took a lot of fight, and a lot of courage, and a lot of strength to get away from these people who would not and could not and did not accept me for being my true self.
And that’s what I think about being a man. At the core of being a man is being a male person who has a true self, a true self with true feelings, true openness, true compassion, true appropriate anger at the right times, a true voice, a true love for himself on the inside, and for others, true gentleness for self. And when there’s a lot of true gentleness for himself, there becomes a surplus that reaches out to others.
It took a hell of a lot of masculine energy for me to fight my way out of my family system, to defend myself against the awful things they said about me when I was trying to break out to become true and real and honor myself, to propel myself forward into life and down into the depths of me.
I think it’s easy, and one way to give a list of all the things a man can be—strong and honest and confident and standing up for what’s right, etc., etc., etc.—but those lists, I read them once upon a time. None of that did anything for me when I, in my early 20s, escaped from my family system as a broken, lost, people-pleasing, confused, semi-human person. It’s like I couldn’t just apply those lists to myself. I couldn’t embody them because I didn’t really have that connection with me deeply, consistently on the inside. I had a lot of work to do, and that work that I had to do, it just went against everything I was raised to be.
The man to be inside of me, the human to be inside of me, had to listen to that voice inside of myself that said, “Do this. Love yourself no matter what. Be true no matter what. Be honest. Take the risk.” And I think that little voice inside of me, I think the little voice that’s within all of us, is neither man nor woman, neither masculine nor feminine. It’s not about gender or sex or any of that. It’s some core of truth underneath it all, and that’s what embodies me now.
After decades of grieving, grieving my losses, fighting for myself, putting up boundaries, getting away, going back and saying, “Well, maybe they’ll love me again,” boom, getting my head slammed again, pulling back, realizing the mistakes I made, trying, learning, failing, trying, learning, failing, trying, learning, succeeding sometimes. Ooh, taking note, I succeeded. What did I do right this time?
Oh, through it all, realizing I have to keep loving myself, being painfully rejected for speaking the truth, painfully rejected by my parents, by so many friends, by society, teachers, bosses. It was a very, very lonely, lonely process to become a real self.
And what I found for me as a man now—now I can actually comfortably say I am a man. I felt fake when I said I am a man when I was younger. I looked like a man. Sometimes I even had a beard in my early 20s, and people said, “Oh, he’s a man.” I wasn’t a man. I was a boy who had the physical body of a man, but I was a lost boy.
Now when I say I’m a man, it’s like it means, in my case, I love myself now. I love who I have become. I don’t love a lot of the things that I have done along the way on this very confusing process. I don’t love the screwed-up things I did when I was a lost, traumatized boy—a lot of them. But somehow, it’s like I got out.
What I find also, on the inside, underneath the surface of this physical masculine self, if you want to put it in terms of gender, is a real mix of masculine and feminine inside of me. I think that’s the healthy way to be—for them, also for women—a mix of this masculine and feminine. The feminine first, the loving myself, the loving others, being compassionate, being a good listener, caring, being open, being flexible, being pliable, being willing to be wrong, being willing to be curious and ask questions, and being open-minded. Those are key parts of being a real man for me, a healthy man. And those are, I think, technically kind of feminine qualities, but I think they’re really important for men to have.
And then yet again, the masculine qualities—the courage, the strength, the willingness to speak, the willingness to have a voice, the willingness to have boundaries, the willingness to say no sometimes, the willingness to say “not acceptable,” the willingness to stand firm and stand strong in the face of the world’s distaste, displeasure, rejection, even the willingness to be alone, the willingness to look inside myself and say, “This is who I really am now, no matter what,” and to be confident, the willingness to be brave sometimes and do things that put myself sometimes at risk for things that I believe.
Me coming and speaking in front of this camera, to me, this is masculine energy. This is part of my being a man. Now, does that mean that a woman couldn’t do a lot of these same things? No, because actually, I know some very healthy women who have that very healthy balance of masculine and feminine and use their masculine energy to do very many of the exact same things that I’m doing and have inspired me to be the best me that I can be.
But is there a difference between being a man and being a woman? If ideally both men and women should have a healthy balance of masculine and feminine, certainly there are some differences. But I don’t know. I think this whole man-woman thing is kind of overrated, honestly. I don’t think about it that much.
On the other hand, I do acknowledge that I have different physical hormones in my body, and I think that’s something that a lot of men have to learn to live with—this very bizarre, strange, often uncomfortable hormone called testosterone inside of us. It causes us to think in strange ways and sometimes to do strange things.
And that’s another thing about being a man—having to learn how to have the strength to be able to live with these male hormones in healthy ways, to not get lost in weird, weird angles of sexuality, to not get lost in pornography, to not get lost in disrespect of making others into sexual objects. That’s another part of really being a man for me in this modern world that has been very, very important—to learn how to use my maleness in a respectful way in the romantic, sexual department.
Certainly, when I was younger and I was a physical man but an emotional, traumatized boy, it was like I was living out all the lessons of our screwed-up world and screwed-up family system and the lessons of my screwed-up father about hooking up with girls and sex and things like this and scoring and trying to get girls. And that’s not being a man; that’s being a…
Very lost, confused boy who’s trying to compensate for his insecurity by putting on a facade of masculinity. But it’s not masculine; it’s just really immature.
So a lot of my process of actually becoming someone who I call much more of a man has involved celibacy, sometimes not even masturbating for long periods of time. Learning how to embody my physical energy on the inside and not expressing it, and not trying to hook up and get girls and win romance, and play some externally defined societal role of what it means to be a man in this absolutely confused world.
To have the right girlfriend, to have the right wife, the right partner, to look the right way and present in the right way, and wear the right clothes, etc., etc.
For me, being a man—and I’m talking about really what it means to feel like a man—when I could honestly say I’m a man has nothing to do with these externals. It’s not about money; it’s not about the right job; it’s not about societal approval; it’s not about the right girlfriend. It’s none of that. In fact, often it’s the opposite.
A lot of times, those external things, successes—which at various points, sometimes to great degrees I achieved—they actually took me farther away from my real deep inside feeling of being a man.
And for me, on the inside, that feeling of being a man comes down to being a self, a real self, who I know, who I feel, and who I love.