I’ve been feeling Emotionally Weird for much of the last three months. A confluence of events left me feeling a bit unmoored, after a few foundational pillars of my life became suddenly unstable. When I’m going through stretches of fragility or uncertainty like this, I feel an incredibly strong urge to retreat inwards. My instincts tell me to stop sharing my feelings with friends or family, to don the mask of “fine”, and then reemerge, day, weeks, or months later as my usual self-confident self. Impervious, independent, and armored. Happy to assist, but never needing assistance.
While this obviously isn’t a male-exclusive phenomenon, it does feel wrapped up in the classical “toxic masculine” aversion to vulnerability. It’s the same spirit that gave us the meme “you couldn’t waterboard this out of me” on social media, posted (usually by men) after someone else (another man) confesses something embarrassing (un-masculine) about their life.
For years I positioned myself counter to this sort of male stereotype, priding myself on being a (sometimes excessively) open and honest person, no waterboarding required. Which makes it doubly disconcerting when, as soon as I’m faced with a sufficiently large obstacle, I feel this intense desire to turn invisible. I thought I’d shed the armor of normative masculinity years ago—now I wonder if I just reforged it into something lighter, but just as rigid.
So I’ve been trying hard to fight this instinct, to share my feelings while they are still messy and unprocessed, rather than waiting for a neat conclusion. But for a while it killed my drive to write. Writing, for me, often comes out of a desire to be seen and known. And for a while, I simply did not wish to be perceived.