'I Don't Know, Man.'

I can relate.

Self-Portrait (1907), Pablo Picasso

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Dear Polly,

There’s a lot of good discussion about masculinity these days. Not just grinding it into a fine powder and starting all over, but remembering what’s beautiful and good about it, what actually makes women want to be around men (and stay with them), and which masculine qualities are worth cultivating.

Lots of talk about polarity, containment, presence. Taking care of business, providing a sense of calm in the storm. The stuff that makes women soften a bit, lower their shoulders, because they know that basically, “It’s being handled.”

Well, fuck.

25 years in, I have this marriage that’s weathered incredible storms and produced two young lads who are going to leave the world better than they found it; an outrageous amount to be grateful for. But in many ways it’s all happened in spite of me, not because of me.

I’m the child of family alcoholism, a terrifying environment that can best be described as “Fargo” but in real life. Violence, guns, fear, tragedy, abuse, early death. I somehow dodged all the usual family bullets of drinkin’ and fightin’ and cheatin’ and so on, but I found other drugs of choice: self-sabotage, financial chaos, staying small, always being in nervous system Emergency Mode.

I got by on charm, humor and talent. Zero recovery, zero therapy. My career constantly threatens to take off like a rocket, but I’ve been my own worst enemy.

She’s still with me, still trying. She says she’s grateful because I was emotionally supportive, faithful, and the best friend she ever had. But polarity? Respect? Sexual tension? Security? Gone with the wind. She feels like she’s parenting me. Trauma, ADHD, she understands it all but there’s no way she’s getting what she needs. And when it bubbles over, the truths that come out of her are brutal. After a major period of grief and breakdown, I’ve finally embraced counseling and 12-step, I’m no longer hiding from the truth, and there’s been a little progress. But I am the opposite of the kind of man women stay with, and this realization has been crushing. I have brought stress, disorder and fear into her life. My shitty story has become part of her story now, because she chose to be with me.

I know this fabled “man” is deep down in me somewhere, but fully inhabiting him seems like Fantasyland.

Sincerely,

I Don’t Know, Man

Dear I Don’t Know Man,

Good timing, man! Because I’m also I Don’t Know Man lately: A mythical creature, vaguely masculine but not at all decisive and just barely attractive. Faintly handsome, sure, but also twitchy, bewildered, besieged by powerful emotions, and deeply conflicted about what should come next.

How does I DON’T KNOW MAN define himself?

I can tell you that he doesn’t. He is, in fact, deeply resistant to all efforts to identify his own strengths or delineate what comes next. He’s spent so many years chipping away at his supposed superpowers — humor, charm, egotism, talent, grandiosity, an ability to spontaneously choose a new direction forward, a new scheme, a new concept of how life should be lived — that now, all he can see is the quivering, transparent glob of Jell-o at the center of his being.

He can see how often he blocks his own path at the very moment when success or victory or expansive evolution is all but assured. He can recognize how his ego-driven schemes are just a product of his addictive, jittery hunger for attention. He was compassionate but he was never a real leader. He was a good friend but he was never admirable or truly honorable. He was a good father but he wasn’t consistently, deeply present. He was funny and wise but he was also ALWAYS terrified, running scared, a giant baby, a weakling, a wilty, androgynous zero.

Listen to me closely, I DON’T KNOW MAN: This is where you belong, in this dark soup of fear, where you are sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will be abandoned for never being strong enough, tough enough, bold enough, steady enough, or present enough to avoid getting left behind.

This darkness is here to remind you that you can’t become what other people want at the expense of what you are. Because as long as you’re primarily focused on what you’re serving up to the people around you — no matter how much you love them! —you start to disappear in plain sight. You want to keep your audience enraptured, you want to keep your lovers seduced, you want to be the hero of your story. But internally, end up killing your truest self in order try (and fail) to serve the roles that you imagine are your duty.

You can’t become what the world wants you to become. You have to be who you are, in each moment, authentically, without fear. Because believing in other people’s magical, mythical stories about what kind of a human being you should be is a trap. It’s not possible to navigate with someone else’s compass. It’s not possible to imitate a victory march when you’re destroying yourself to do it.

That doesn’t mean you have to become the opposite, your worst fears, a pathetic whining baby. You can cry long and hard but when your sorrowful inertia starts to feel shitty, you get up and consider eating an apple and going for a walk. You can sort through your ruinous finances, but when the numbers start to give you a headache, you crawl into bed and cry if that’s what feels soothing. You can be strong and comfort your wife when she’s feeling exhausted from parenting you, but when you start to feel terrified, you have to SAY SO OUT LOUD.

And you have to ask yourself: Why does your fantasy — the thought of becoming a strong, consistent rock for her to lean on — also horrify or sicken you to your core?

There are reasons inside your body. And there is no morally correct answer. There is no sin hidden behind your distaste for masculinity. There is nothing unethical about loving what you love and hating what you hate. And there is nothing wrong with noticing that THESE FEELINGS AND URGES AND IDENTITIES SOMETIMES CHANGE LIKE THE WEATHER.

Now let me offer you my own version of what you’re going through and who you think you should be. Even though I understand exactly what your wife is struggling with when she feels like she has to parent you — I’ve been there so many times with so many men — I also want you know that if my husband wanted me to be MORE OF A WOMAN, I would immediately become a sledgehammer or a squirrel or a sword or a weasel or a rat instead.

I would shrivel up or explode. I can’t become someone else’s idea of what is most attractive, most reliable, most convenient, or everything I love about myself will blow away.

Even though I’ve been a nurturing, graceful, feminine woman at various times in my life, at this I DON’T KNOW MAN moment in my life, I feel more like a tangled strand of lint. I’m just not sure. I don’t feel all that triumphant at the moment. I feel uncertain about where to focus my attention.

Now I want you to listen to the song HOUDINI CRUSH by Buke & Gase. (Cue it up, people! We need an audio component to feel everything we need to feel today!)

Hear that macho rock-n-roll guitar? That’s a man who’s determined to be strong and confident and swaggery at any cost.

But wait, what’s this? A second, more ambient guitar sound: climbing, sustained, distorted, sweet and soaring like a pink cloud floating high above the frozen ground at dawn. We are poised and ready to feel things now! Brace yourself!!!

You say you’re dead and gone and you’re moving on
Beyond the regular rectangular

Listen to that incredible soprano. What a surprise! Bewitching and wild and challenging. This is a woman, sweet and nurturing, but she’s pretty tired.

Don’t get confused, though. She’s not tired of parenting some wilty excuse for a man. She’s tired of being told that her savage, imaginative, passionate love is something average and mundane, by a man who still believes in rigid roles, and believes that his escapism makes him a courageous renegade.

You stay out all night
It was a weapon you could use
To get through all the threads in sight

Her absent lover is an evasive man who won’t look at himself, won’t recognize the truth of her words when she’s brutal, won’t acknowledge that sometimes he’s pathetic, sometimes he’s weak, sometimes he’s a big baby. Instead he goes out drinking and dismisses her as weak.

THAT’S NOT YOU. YOU’RE STRONGER THAN THAT.

I love that bass drum so much! Three beats, a warning that she’s reaching her limit, but also a warning that she’s going to start crying, start dancing, start challenging you to get up and dance with her.

How you gonna wave hello or goodbye
When your hands are tied

to the end of the threads

inside

inside

inside

Your wife is the woman in this song, but so are you. You’re showing yourselves to each other, holding on tight, feeling everything, crying, raging, falling to pieces. She can say that she feels like she’s parenting you, and I understand that. But you are her best friend. You never leave, even when you feel terrible. And sometimes being someone’s best friend is even more difficult than being someone’s parent. You have to be flexible. you have to listen to an avalanche of words, you have to keep following, and you have to stay humble. That’s one of your true strengths. And even though right now it feels to both of you like everything is coming apart?

YOU’RE WRONG.

Everything is exactly as it should be.

I know you’d rather be a rock. You want to be a strong man, waving to your audience, admired, adored. But you can’t do that if you’re all tangled up and trapped by the parts of yourself that you tried to kill every single time you ran away from the truth, ran away from spectacular, soul-shifting love, ran away from the glorious burst of color and passion and transcendence that appears in the wake of facing yourself and hating yourself and falling apart.

After you crawl and cry and feel like nothing, you find your passion again. Believe it.

This song makes me cry. But I also feel so strong, so glorious, so alive. Those three bass beats feel like a challenge to tolerate my I DON’T KNOW MAN state and continue to face the day with everything I have, in spite of my fears, in spite of my humiliations, in spite of my indecision, in spite of my inability to be perfectly nurturing and passionate and wise.

I don’t have all of the answers and I hate it when I feel like I have to act like I do just to survive this fucked up, dark world.

I’m not a hero. And I’m not just a writer or a mother or a wife or a success or a failure.

I am more than any of those things and also less than any of those things. I’m a pink cloud at dawn, floating high above the frozen ground. I am a man and a woman and a frightened girl and I don’t know what comes next.

I DON’T KNOW, MAN.

I get up some mornings and I’m afraid of the commitments I made the day before. I don’t want to do that thing I decided was smart and profitable. I don’t want to finish that project that seemed promising. You can call that self-sabotage if you want to, but I think I’m recovering from a major injury to my core self, to my ego, to my vision of who I should be. My gut tells me that I have to heal for a while. I have to slowly start to understand WHY I expect so much of myself in spite of the fact that I’m in pain.

All of this hurt came from nowhere and no one is to blame for it, but I still have to feel it whenever it comes up. Sometimes that means I have to listen to the same song 10 times in a row.

Some people might say I’m just a big, pathetic baby.

Luckily, though, my husband doesn’t tell me that. And I don’t think your wife’s most brutal words are meant to be taken literally, either. I think she knows the difference between true weakness (an escapist, an arrogant avoidant, an evasive hero who pretends he’s strong while he murders his true feelings) and true strength (a human being whose ideas of himself shift and change as often as his moods, an artist who improvises new ways to make a living regularly, a best friend who shows up over and over again, even when his self-hatred is at an all-time high).

I think your story of being abandoned is inaccurate. I don’t believe your wife is halfway out the door. I think you’re looking for a way to escape what you see as her real view of you, the view she shares when she’s angry. In your family, people only spoke honestly and directly when they were drunk and pissed off. They didn’t say, “I will always love you no matter how you feel or what you want to become next.” They said, “You’re ridiculous, you’re pathetic, you’re a piece of shit.”

Your fears are based on their furious, drunk words, not based on how your wife truly feels. She’s not going anywhere. So stop trying to abandon yourself by writing that role for her. Stop looking for everything to implode just so you won’t have to continue to face your own terrors and discomfort and disgust with yourself. Stop projecting your self-hatred onto your wife and making it hers.

Feel where you are. Feel your self-hatred. Keep crying. Notice how your body feels.

Keep going to therapy. Keep listening to music and giving yourself time to heal. Keep showing up for your wife, which you do in your own way and always, always have. Be uncertain and whiny and self-hating out in the open for as long as it takes to say out loud:

“Please address me as I DON’T KNOW MAN. Because I just don’t know.”

The more you accept exactly where and what and who you are at this moment, the more you feel what you feel and embrace this glorious, perfect dissolution of your former so-called honorable manly values, the more you’ll see that true masculinity and true femininity are much more beautiful and palatable and helpful and seductive and fully present when they are blended together, when they shift and change, when they can be their gigantic, dynamic, loud selves. Why do you think Houdini Crush is such a great song? Why do you think so many people love Heated Rivalry? (I haven’t watched it yet, my god I know what is wrong with me, but I’m going to start it this afternoon, a perfect I DON’T KNOW MAN viewing appointment!)

In order to become whole, you have to integrate all of the ridiculously limited, one-dimensional, cartoonish roles that you imagine you should be playing with all of the things you fear and loathe, the things that embarrass and delight you, until you form one EXQUISITE CREATURE.

You don’t need to become a man. You don’t need to become a woman. You need to follow the threads inside, and feel proud of everything there, no matter how ugly and soft and angry and silent it gets. You need to celebrate the threads inside, even when you feel disgusting and lost, a crumpled strand of lint, a crying baby, a seething old woman, a hissing rat.

I don’t know what I’ll be tomorrow. Some force inside me is asking for a big change in how I live. I don’t know what will rise up to the surface and teach me what I need to learn next. I’m open to not knowing yet. I’m open to feeling this pain. I’m going to be patient with this lost place.

The only thing I know is that I DON’T KNOW MAN is a fucking hero. It’s time you saw that. It’s time you felt that, deep inside.

The passion isn’t gone. Respect is still there. Security will return. You’re a fucking hero. Look at your life more closely. Stop trying to pretend that you’re the enemy, the loser, the failure, the follower, the weak one. Stop saying you’re not a man. Stop seeing the world through other people’s fears, other people’s cartoons. Your softness and flexibility are supernatural, superhuman strengths. You can translate hard things into simple terms. Why do you think your sons turned out so well?

And every single time you look at yourself and say, “My god, I hate myself even more than I thought”? You’re a hero all over again. That’s real life. That’s beauty. That’s divinity itself. Not everyone goes there, but you’re very brave. Don’t you see that? Can’t you try to see it?

Keep looking. Keep waiting, until you can see it, until you can finally feel proud of exactly what you are: a rat, a cloud, a dad, a child, a lover, a miracle.

Polly

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