Healing male spirit
On reclaiming feeling, bell hooks's 'The Will to Change,' and our only path to healing: community.
My name is Raleigh, and I use he/him pronouns. Two feelings I am feeling in my body right now are: anxiety and sluggishness. My biggest takeaway from this week’s reading is the devastating line:
“Disconnection is masculinity.”
This is how we checked in at the beginning of each session of the summer reading group I joined, in which we read feminist writer bell hooks’s The Will to Change. I hadn’t read the book before, but the group was facilitated by my friend and mentor Michael, for whom my admiration is so big I’d blindly join a barefoot Antarctic run club if he recommended it.
I’ve recently come to find an improbable sense of community and belonging at my local spin studio (more words to come on that!), and this newfound sense of belonging has shined big huge construction-bright lights on the fact that I’ve been preposterously lonely and without community for much of my adult life.
Over the years, I’ve attempted to seek community with other men, attempts criss-crossed with rejection. My freshman year, my sudden style transformation (I’d come into the possession of Underoath’s They’re Only Chasing Safety on CD, which exploded my world, tightened my pants, and flat-ironed my hair) caused my college baseball teammates to reject me harshly – a locker room incident, cutting words and eviscerating looks – and I quit soon after. Later in college at some men’s Bible study group, I confessed to lust and was called a monster. Shamed, I never went back. Subsequent men's groups urged me to be a warrior or a soldier – but never to be myself. I’ve learned to fit into certain troupes (and tropes) of men – I can talk sports all day, rattling off names of old ballplayers, and know my way around the weight room – but I know deep in my bones where my true, vulnerable self is – or isn’t – welcome: among men.
Michael recommended The Will to Change, said it might have a thing or two to say about the way men and boys are socialized to disconnect, to reject, to inflict pain and avoid it. He said it sounded like I was feeling some pain, and asked if I wanted to join, to be a part of a group.
Some things I learned from bell hooks that deserve more than to be wedged into a 1,400-word essay and upon which I tried to expound but that are also so perfectly elucidated by hooks herself that you should just read the whole dang book:
Disconnection is not merely disconnection from others (although it most certainly is that) – it is, crucially and devastatingly, disconnection from ourselves.
Patriarchal culture forces boys to violently disintegrate – yanking boys away from their own expressiveness (toys and clothes and songs and colors and games!), from their feelings (sweet and tender and soft and big!), and from sensitivity to others (aware and in-touch and emotionally keen!).
If boys don’t get the hint and amputate their emotional parts, other men will “enact rituals of power” to ensure they get the message that Real men don’t ________.
(These rituals might just play out in, say, college baseball locker rooms and church basement Bible studies.)
Estranged from themselves, then, how can men be anything but estranged from others?
This catastrophic estrangement brings grief, but men have no emotional outlet for grief, no safe spaces in which to mourn.
Into this emotional vacuum, men bring forth anger, emotional and physical violence, urges to dominate.
Choosing patriarchal manhood, dominance, and violence over true loving connection, men find themselves to be in pain, and preposterously alone.
“To heal, men must learn to feel again. They must learn to break the silence, to speak the pain.”
On the Zoom call, Michael has us place our hand on our heart. He leads us in a guided meditation, all of us sitting at desks in various towns across America, men and women, deep breaths in through our nose and out through our mouth. I forget to turn off my camera, but I figure everyone else has their eyes closed anyway.
Michael leads us through a body scan: toes and ankles and calves, legs and hips and stomach – where wedges of my emotions tend to lodge – chest and diaphragm and shoulders, cheeks and lips and scalp. We sit and breathe and allow feelings that we’re feeling to surface. Michael asks us to greet our feelings with equanimity, to witness them, to thank them, to say You are welcome here and I will take care of you. We all sit there at our computers with our hands on our hearts, welcoming feelings – of grief and pain and love and tenderness, anxiety and dread and excitement and joy – the feelings are just whatever is coming up, whatever is there. We allow them.
In this moment, my body becomes profoundly still. Huge onrushes of stillness. Deep breaths that seem to give air to my entire being – wrists and toes and hips and eyes. The big soft deep breaths make me entirely relaxed and still – a buzzy, active quiet. In the stillness, I notice my stomach: way back in there, something drops a little, falls, lets go. I experience it as sadness. Grief. A fragile welling behind my eyes. With my hand on my heart, I hold myself.
For several minutes, I allow my body to remain like this – openness, tenderness, grief, sadness, love. It’s all swirled into one, breathed in and breathed out, this openness-tenderness-grief-sadness-love seeming to emanate from me, from my cheeks and hands and feet on out into the carpet beneath me. I feel grief for all the versions of me who were never allowed fully to be me. The mes who were rejected. The connection that all the mes missed out on. I hold my heart, the heart of this me, the heart of all my mes. I say Thank you, I say I love you.
Our homework each week is to look for ways to disobey the patriarchy.
Half the time, I forget to. (It can be frighteningly easy to forget the homework when, as a nepo baby of the patriarchy, I’ve always gotten an A+ on it just for signing my name.) My weekly act of disobedience, when I remember, is to practice emotional intimacy, vulnerability, and availability with men: my roommate, the guy at the gym, the barista, my brother. It’s not that I have to share revealing secrets or ask probing personal questions – it’s just a posture of openness. A refusal to shut down, a refusal to defer and deflect into posturing and irony and the classic jocular chuckle fest into which male conversations often devolve. It can be as easy as saying, How are you, man? and actually listening. Or really telling. Being disobedient is really easy, and being disobedient is really hard.
I am lucky to have found the glimmers of community I’ve found in spin class. Literally blessed to have found a little community of fellow writers. Being a part of this reading group, immersing myself in the work of bell hooks, has been a gift.
There’s so much more of hooks’s work to unpack, so many more bricks in the edifice of the patriarchy to dismantle, waves of physical and emotional violence enacted upon women and children to cease. For now, we start where we are, we acknowledge and experience our feelings, we do our homework, we fling ourselves into community where we can find it. We become willing to change.
At the end of our meetings, we check out, just like we do at the start. In our final session, I happen to be called on to check out last.
My name is Raleigh — he/him pronouns. Two emotions I am feeling in my body are nervous and tender. My biggest takeaway is hooks telling is that “Healing does not take place in isolation” – that we have to do this in community, with each other.
As I say this on the Zoom call, I gesture with my arms, stretching them wide to encompass all of us, each other, our little community. In doing this, I inadvertently trigger a reaction within the Zoom platform: suddenly, on my little rectangular video screen, digitized balloons cascade all around me. The faces of men and women all across the screen, all across the country, break into smiles and laughter. They clap for me, and cheer, as the balloons rain down.
There’s so much conversation here. Can’t have it in the comments probably but damn.