Why Do We Not Normalize Male Emotions?
I was recently going back through my old Facebook posts for some reason. I decided to start deleting the posts that felt random. I deleted posts where I was checking in at the movie theaters, letting people know what movie I was watching. I also deleted posts that were just angry outbursts of frustration. It seemed in my younger years, I used my Facebook as free therapy to vent my feelings.
Going through my old posts took me back in time, from present day all the way back to 2012. As I read my old posts, I began deleting pictures, comments, statements, and anything that I no longer believe or anything that doesn’t match with who I am today. During this time travel back in time into my own thoughts, I came to a few realizations. By age thirty I was an angry person. Many of my posts involved profanity, anger towards the MTA, anger towards the job I disliked, anger towards my family and anger towards a toxic environment. I had so much anger in my heart and it seemed to be the only emotion that I understood well. I knew that I was angry. I knew where some of the anger was coming from but I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to vent my rage. I didn’t know how to turn that rage into a positive force or how to turn it towards a positive hobby. I knew absolutely nothing about controlling the rage within me.
Looking at myself today, am I still this angry person? No. I have become something else. Now I am calmer. I have more Zen in my life and while there are still things that upset me, I have found better ways to deal with them now. So the version of me from 2012 to the version of me in 2021 are two complete strangers.
I asked myself what has changed in all that time? I have been in different relationships and have heard the complaints from my partners that I don’t open up. They complained that I never told them what was on my mind or that I rarely ever told them when I felt sad. It has been this lack of communication that has been the downfall of many of my relationships in my lifetime. So when asked why would I not open up and just be vulnerable and share what I was feeling or thinking, I realized for a long time I couldn’t do those things. Until now, I did not have the understanding of the emotions I was feeling or the language to be able to fully express what I was feeling.
Why did I not have the language to express what I was feeling? Why did I not have the tools that I needed to deal with the emotions I was experiencing? How could I even identify those emotions in the first place? That’s when I realized I grew up without a father figure in my life for the majority of it. I grew up without my mother in my life for the majority of it and was raised by a strong grandmother. Now because of how I was raised and with whom I was raised there were not many opportunities for boys to express emotions.
In school, if a boy was injured or cried or was sad they were told to stop crying, “to man up” as they say because it was not the place for a boy to cry. That is what we were told. At home, if a boy had a problem with a female neighbor or got into an argument the boy was told to apologize while the girl was allowed to cry. The boy was not allowed the same courtesy. Growing up there seemed to be a fear of a boy not being masculine. Boys were not allowed to play with dolls. Boys were not allowed to sit in the pink chair because some adult said that that’s not something boys do. Boys don’t cry. Boys don’t cook. Boys don’t clean; these are all things women do.
Obviously, I don’t believe those antiquated statements. I don’t even think as a child I believed them. I thought something was wrong there. So when do we as males, get a chance to learn what our emotions are? In school, we don’t get that opportunity to learn what our emotions are. There was no social-emotional education when I was in school. From a young age, we learned that if we have a bully, if we have a problem, we use our fists. That was how we solved our problems, not by talking it through, not by exploring our feelings, but through violence. Years later as young adults, 18-year-olds, we are told that we are old enough to go into the army, we are old enough to get shot at, we are old enough to die in another country. Yet that same 18-year-old and 19-year-old does not know how to deal with depression and does not know how to express sadness. Even with an entire group of friends we don’t open up, we don’t know how to, and so we bottle up our emotions. Those bottled-up emotions become toxic, we become angry and that becomes the only emotion we’re allowed to show the world.
Nowadays I’ll sit and watch cartoons and sometimes I cry. If anyone has watched the Avatar series, the scene where uncle Iroh honors his dead son brings me to tears. The Avatar series also shows a scene where Prince Zuko meets up with his uncle one more time and apologizes and he’s hugged and shown unconditional love. How many of us men would love to have that feeling of unconditional love, to have a safe space to express what we feel.
We as a male species have been so separated from our emotions for so long that confronting those emotions and finding them is terrifying. As we get older and we get more experience, we are starting to discover our feelings and emotions. To any woman dealing with a guy that seems closed off, let me offer this, it’s not that we don’t want to share our deepest darkest feelings, it’s that we are having a hard time finding them, identifying them, and finding the language to talk about them.
Let’s start normalizing that boys have feelings too. That way the next generation will have men who are more emotionally stable. Emotionally stable men will make better partners, better fathers, better role models for those who come after.
