Frankly Put: Steps to Self Love II
I think it is time to get on this. I keep telling myself to turn this into some form of a series tackling the various sides to the human being so here we go, part two!
I have, in recent times, been putting some effort into creating spaces where I could feel comfortable opening up and maybe it is just me but it’s kind of difficult. I think to the way for the majority of the relations I have with other men, it’s not something that we speak on; the emotional. How we “feel” about certain things. Now, don’t get me wrong there are certain interactions where the “feelings” are discussed and it is this odd mix of comfortable discomfort that is difficult to explain.
To be honest, it is probably one of the hardest parts of life men (mostly) have to learn to deal with. I don’t think I can really say there is too much room to live and learn to live in emotions. It is something that is changing, yes, however it is still a bit odd to watch a man break down and have an outburst in emotion other than anger. Growing up, (I say as if I have been here through aeons) I don’t think it was something I was exposed to enough or in a positive light.
Looking back, I think it was more negative than it felt at the time. Emotion (other than anger) was seen as weak, as soft. True to big man Darwin’s theory, it is survival of the fittest among men, thus for you to show weakness you can be eliminated and that is a lonely thought. Recently, I have been consuming a lot of content around the idea of loneliness and how there is an instinctual fear of it. Perhaps, that is what forced a lot of us as young boys to do and say some things that only furthered this broken system that works against us.
Now, this is different from the idea of being alone, to which I believe as a man it is something one should be able to culture in oneself regardless of whether you are an introvert or the most social being. It is healthy and helpful in figuring parts of you that society doesn’t offer us to address. This is not on some “red pill philosophies” but we do need to learn to be alone, it makes us self reliant and creates a value that draws people to us. Naturally, a man must build his value, as it is something you do not come into this earth with (societally not like the value of life). Tying it back to the topic at hand, there is that some of that value in emotional intelligence.
I wish it was cultured more into our upbringing. Luckily for me, I was blessed enough to be surrounded by bits and pieces of that concept, which I still had to pick out of cumulative stigma but hey, I am grateful it was taught albeit in parables. Looking at it, we cheered anger as boys, it showed you were tough, that you were strong. I was not one of those “angry ones”, which says a lot about my place on the social ladder very early on in life. I am still tearing through a lot of the gifts of cooking in that broth in my formative years. There are still things I do, that reflecting on, I am left wondering if it has become second nature and if it will never leave me.
There a lot of lessons I can say I wish were actually looked into before we propagated them amongst our peers. One major one is “Boys shouldn’t cry.” Admittedly, this has surged discussions with men at my age, which have ended in agree-to-disagree stalemates. My stand on it is that perhaps it began as a sentiment in good faith that slowly became poisoned further down the totem pole. The way I see it, I have to agree and disagree with it, which is a shift from it being a modelling mantra in life. Am I scarred from taking the statement at face value and not digging deeper to understand the logic in it? Yes.
It is a bit of a shell-shocking experience to trace the root of my view and find that I was actually swimming in two polarizing pools of thought. One where crying was the worst thing you could do as a boy and where crying was encouraged to the point of being forced to do it (you can almost guess where the two schools of thought came from). Taking those two opposites, I put them both into a pot and mixed them into each other until I figured something that tasted nice to me. You know, chakula cha kujenga mwili.
Although, what do I see it as? Life has brutally shown me, men shouldn’t allow themselves to be blindly overcome by any emotion, be it anger, be it sadness, whatever. Does that mean we shouldn’t feel or express them? Hell no. In fact, I think we should be encouraged to feel these things to the level of understanding our emotions more than just cut them off. So when it’s said “Boys shouldn’t cry” I’ve come to take it as momentary, “Hey, pull yourself together, do not be a slave to your emotion.” Could I attribute it to being a protector? Yes. It isn’t wise to be blinded in situations where one is to be a grounding factor, especially where a problem needs to be solved. A “one-eyed man is a king amongst the blind" kind of thinking.
The way I see it, crying is a form of expression of emotion. Perhaps the face of the company of expressing oneself. Emotion is a vulnerability that is a tricky thing as it can be a weakness as well as a strength, depending on where it exists; again, speaking from a man’s perspective. We, terrifyingly enough do not have spaces to express them without it being twisted and used against us. I have come to value that vulnerability a lot. Moreover, finding it expressed from the more unexpected places only fuels this belief; not everyone in life deserves to have access to that vulnerability.
It is unlikely to find a man who didn’t at one point dream of being Superman, to the point it has become an endearing sentiment. I mean, tell a man he is your superman and that compliment will be held onto for years. Could this be the reason we avoid the very things that make us human; emotions? Did wanting to attain this image of being invincible push us so far? Maybe. However, even Superman has a place where he is only Clark Kent.
I am still putting in the effort to create the spaces where I can hang this cape and still enjoy the strength in the humanity underneath. It has been an uphill struggle but I think accepting emotion as a part of oneself helps one love themselves a little more, let alone learn and understand themselves; love is an emotion, right?
To emote is to human and I am learning to love this humanity every day, to put it Frankly.
