[A love letter to myself]
Listen up, brother.
We need to talk. You and me. Man to man. Human to human. Whatever the fuck to whatever the fuck.
Society’s been playing three card Monte with our emotions for decades, and guess what?
The house always wins.
Always. Has. Always. Will.
You know the script…
“Be strong.”
“Man up.”
“Boys don’t cry.”
“Grow a pair.”
Then the same motherfuckers turn around and say…
“Why don’t men talk about their feelings?”
“Toxic masculinity is killing you.”
“You need to open up.”
“Be vulnerable.”
And you do. You actually do. You crack open that chest cavity like a lobster at a fancy restaurant, steam rising from your exposed soft parts, and what happens?
Bang
Those same feelings get weaponised faster than you can say “emotional intelligence”
That argument three months later? “Remember when you cried about your dad?”
That promotion you didn’t get? “Maybe you’re too emotional for leadership.”
That relationship that went sideways? “You’re too needy.”
The game is rigged, friend. The house knows all the cards because the house printed the fucking deck.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
Where the real work begins.
You don’t need to play their game.
See, being a man.
A real man , not the cardboard cut out they’re selling you means understanding this fundamental truths…
You can be the rock without being made of stone. You can be the shelter without closing all the windows.
Forget the pills. Red, blue, black, purple, rainbow fucking sparkle lemonade they’re all just different flavours of the same poisoned Kool Aid.
They want you picking sides in a war where both armies are shooting at you.
You see another brother struggling? You don’t need to crack him open like a therapy piñata. You don’t need to force feelings out of him like you’re performing some form of emotional CPR.
You just… be there.
Stand next to him. Solid. Present. Available.
Maybe you’re working on a car together. Maybe you’re playing some game. Maybe you’re just sitting on a porch drinking beer and watching the world burn in that special way it burns these days.
There’s a lot of burning going on anyways…
And if he opens up? If he decides to trust you with whatever demons are eating him from the inside out?
You shut your mouth and you listen. You hold that space like you’re protecting the last clean water source in the wasteland. Because that’s what trust is in this world?
It’s scarce, precious, and easily contaminated. You see it all the time on the interwebs.
You don’t judge. You don’t fix. You don’t turn it into a TED talk about healing or chakras or star signs or any of that bullshit.
You just… witness. You bear witness to another human being’s pain without trying to own it, solve it, or compare it to your own.
That’s the job. That’s the real fucking job.
Not being invulnerable, being unbreakable. There’s a difference. Invulnerable means nothing gets in. Unbreakable means you can take the hits and keep standing.
We’re building something here. Not for us. hell, we’re already halfway cooked by this toxic soup we’ve been swimming in.
But for the kids coming up. For the boys who are watching us right now, learning what it means to be a man by how we handle our shit.
They need to see us strong AND struggling.
They need to see us fierce AND afraid.
They need to see us leading AND learning.
Because the old model? The strong-silent-suffer-in-silence-until-you-explode model? That shit’s killing us. Literally. Look at the statistics. Look at the suicide rates. Look at the addiction numbers. Look at the violence we do to ourselves and others because we’ve got nowhere else to put all this pressure.
But the new model they’re pushing? The “just be vulnerable and everything will be fine” fairytale? That’s not working either. Vulnerability without safety is just exposure and exposure in a hostile environment is how you die.
So we build something different. Something real.
We look out for each other without making it weird. We create spaces where men can just BE without having to perform masculinity OR perform vulnerability. We stop treating emotions like they’re either poison or medicine and start treating them like what they are…
Information. Data.
Signals from the meat computer that something needs attention.
You want to lead the next generation?
Start here…
Be the man who makes it safe for other men to be human.
Not safe to fall apart. Safe to be whole. All of it. The rage and the tenderness. The strength and the fear. The competence and the confusion.
Because at the end of the day, after all the shouting matches about what men should or shouldn’t be, after all the think pieces and hot takes and fucking Twitter threads and LinkedIn fuckery, we still have to wake up tomorrow and BE…
Be fathers. Be brothers. Be friends. Be workers. Be leaders. Be humans.
And we can’t do that if we’re spending all our energy performing for an audience that can’t even agree on what play we’re supposed to be in.
So fuck the script. Fuck the pills. Fuck the endless debate about who’s more oppressed or who has it harder or who needs to change first.
Just be a good human to other humans. Start with the ones who look like you, sure, because that’s where you have the most influence, the most understanding, the most ability to create change. But don’t stop there.
This is how we fix this shit. Not with grand gestures or political movements or therapy speak infiltrating every conversation.
One man at a time. One moment at a time. One “I got you, brother” at a time.
That’s the job. That’s the calling. That’s what it means to be a man in this particular clusterfuck of a timeline we’re crawling through at the moment.
ou don’t have to save everyone. You don’t have to fix everything. You don’t even have to fix yourself.
You just have to show up. Be present. Be real. Be unbreakable in your commitment to giving a shit about other people while also protecting your own capacity to keep showing up.
Because the boys are watching. The next generation is taking notes. And what they need to see is not perfect men or sensitive men or strong men or woke men or based men or any other brand of men.
They need to see WHOLE men. Complicated, contradictory, trying-their-best, failing-and-getting-back-up men.
That’s you. That’s me. That’s all of us, if we can get out of our own way long enough to remember that we’re all just trying to make it through.
So yeah. For the boys. But really, for all of us.
Because we all deserve better than what we’ve been sold.
We all deserve the chance to be human.
Even, especially, the ones who’ve been told that being human is the one thing they’re not allowed to be.
Stay unbreakable, brother.
Stephen Walker.
P.S. If this hit you somewhere deep, somewhere you don’t usually let things hit? Good. Sit with that. You don’t have to do anything with it. Just know that feeling something doesn’t make you weak. It makes you alive. And alive is all we’ve got.
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom