If someone is taking you on a journey, you probably want to have some confidence that that person knows where he or she is going. If you are going to follow that person, you may want to know a little more about him or her. Well, I am going to do my best to be a guide, so I would like to share a little more about myself and what this journey has been like for me.
Like a lot of men, I was not given a very good map with which to chart the course of my life and my relationships. I do not blame anyone anymore for that; it is just how it worked out. My parents didn’t have very good maps, either. I have tried to map out the specific landscape of my relationships and have a better sense of where I am headed. Metaphorically, I have spent a lot of my life wanting to get to Paris, France, not realizing that my map only took me to Paris, Texas! The relationships I have craved in my life have been there, but I did not know how to find them—or appreciate them when I did. And again, this struggle starts with the Rules.
Every man has his own relationship to the Man Rules. I was born in 1972. If there were one word that would best describe the way my generation (and subsequent generations) responds to the Rules, it would be confusion. For many of us, the Rules (though still in effect and still invisible) have been softened and have become less stringent than they were in previous generations. That is both positive and negative. It is positive because we have more room to move around as far as what is expected of us. It is negative, however, because there is less certainty. There is more flexibility, but it is less clear when a particular Rule is going to be enforced and when it is not.
I was a rough-and-tumble kid. I was very athletic. I loved to play football with the neighborhood kids, and I was good at it. But Mom wouldn’t let me play football out of fear I would get hurt. I played soccer and excelled at that, along with street hockey, BMX, tennis, and golf. I loved playing with soldiers and matchbox cars, and doing anything outside. I was a boy’s boy. But I did not consider myself tough. As I mentioned earlier, I was also very sensitive and emotional. I seemed to have an inborn anxiety. This was all one big strike against me; it was against the Rules. I was the kid who would tackle another boy and feel bad if I hurt him. I hated violence. I didn’t like to fight. Strike two: I was a mama’s boy. She was the one I attached to and spent a lot of time protecting and trying to comfort when my father hurt her both emotionally and physically. I cried a lot. I also liked to read, write poetry, and even play with my sister and her friends. More strikes against me. More violations of the Rules. Nonetheless, on the surface I was pretty much following the same map as the rest of my friends. Though I was considered popular, and even “cool,” internally I felt confused and conflicted.
As an adolescent I had an unusual and deeply painful experience. My body literally did not grow. To say I was a late bloomer is an understatement. I became acutely aware of this in eighth grade, but there were still a few other boys who also had yet to hit puberty. The summer between eighth and ninth grade I had hoped “it” would happen, but it didn’t. I stayed short and began to feel more and more powerless. The shame about who I was and about my body began to spread like a weed throughout my psyche. It was a secret, and I had to protect myself from being found out to save myself from the ultimate humiliation.
I was five feet tall and about ninety pounds when I entered high school. I was intimidated by all of the bigger guys—and they were all bigger. My body had betrayed me. One incident was particularly humiliating. It was very early in our freshman year, and we had just finished our PE class. Everyone had to take showers. Everyone. I did my best to get out of it, but I simply wasn’t allowed. I had to take a shower, and ended up choosing the lesser of two humiliations. After all of the guys had finished, I stripped down to my underwear, stepped into the shower in my underwear, and turned the shower on. I stood under the water for the longest thirty seconds of my life and quickly got out of the shower. I cannot remember if the other boys were there or not. That was one of many humiliations that year that gave me a rude awakening to the new world in which I was living—high school—where the Rules went to the next level. It was very clear to me that I no longer fit in; I was no longer cool. And I definitely was still just a boy in a world where developing into a man was the most important rite of passage.
I would stare at my naked body over and over again in the mirror, cursing myself and God. I wouldn’t shower for days. I started having night terrors. I’d sleep over at a friend’s house and have the night terrors there as well. I almost punched a friend’s grandfather when he came to check on me because I had been screaming and cursing in my sleep. I refused to stay the night at friends’ houses after that. I became genuinely afraid for my sanity, yet somehow was still able to attend school day after day. Was it any wonder I was such a huge discipline problem?
My sophomore year was full of more suffering: crying myself to sleep almost every night, praying to God that I would just grow, and suffering my father’s rage and abuse when he wasn’t passed out in various rooms throughout the house. I had such deep shame that I spoke to nobody. I even desperately tried to make my voice change simply by talking deeper. I did everything I could to give some semblance of having hit puberty. It was daily torture. If I had already been hypervigilant from growing up in an alcoholic home, I was now hyper-hypervigilant. I was traumatized.
Finally, after some help from a guidance counselor, Brother Paul, and my father walking into my room after I carved “Fuck You” into my arm, I was taken to our family doctor who referred me to a specialist at Georgetown University Hospital. I was medically treated with shots of testosterone for six months over the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. During this time, nobody—absolutely nobody—offered me any kind of compassion or empathy. They either said nothing or made what I now realize were very insensitive and inappropriate jokes and comments. Nobody told me that this didn’t make me defective, that it wasn’t my fault, or that there was nothing wrong with me. I had already spent two years coming to the conclusion that I was broken and being punished by “God,” and this was never challenged by anyone in my family or anyone at school. Adding emotional injury to insult, my father was too drunk to drive me to get one of the last shots, so I drove myself. Here I was at sixteen, hoping desperately to shed the boy-skin in which I was stuck, driving myself to the final appointment to receive the “magic serum” medically pushing me into manhood.
Early in my recovery I met some men, including my first sponsor, who had had similar experiences, but these did not seem to have been nearly as traumatic for them as for me. They also did not grow up in a violent home. Or maybe it was the difference in our personalities. But my reaction to everything that happened between ages fourteen and sixteen was extreme and profound. My intelligence, voracious introspection, and pathological sensitivity all worked against me, making everything worse. I obsessed about it daily and knew that every boy, girl, man, and woman was looking at me and “knew.” They knew I was just a boy. They were laughing at me. God was doing this to me. It became a deeply existential crisis. I was convinced that I was not a “real” young man. I was broken, ugly, and weak, and felt like a freak.
Now, when I tell this part of my story in my trainings and workshops, other men begin to open up about similar experiences—men like me, who you would not think were walking around ten, twenty, even thirty years later still feeling like a little powerless, scrawny kid. A truth I have discovered is that many men can identify with this type of experience to varying degrees. This is a trauma many of us have been carrying around, hidden deep inside us, for far too long.
I recently met with a young guy who looked exactly like me when I was eighteen: dark hair, short, tan, with a slender build. It was emotional as I looked into this mirror. I asked him as gently as I could how old he was. “Eighteen.” My heart sank for him as I projected my pain onto him and empathized with his situation. I shared a little bit about my experience and saw the sadness enter his face. I mentioned being medically treated to grow, and another young man in the same treatment program told me about his struggle with being small and not hitting puberty until his junior year and what that was like for him. Finally, there was another young man who also said that he had been scrawny long into his high school years and that he still struggled with those self-images. In his case it led to an unhealthy