Men

I'm a very emotional and sensitive creature, always have been. The subtlest of changes can affect me dramatically. Things such as subtle scents, certain spices, voice pitch, placement of furniture, and especially amount of sunlight can have big impacts on me. The emotional world for me is not separate from the external world. As I grow, I've learned that what we feel inside does not arise out of magic, that as private as we like to think we are, nothing is ever really private.

I'm undergoing some profound emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental changes. I can feel it, I am it. We are always changing after all, and my whole life I've been very receptive to the changes I undergo, whether or not it seems like it to others. I'm becoming a man, the inevitable is happening ha ha. In a way, I feel like a child who just learned how to walk, not yet ready to run, and is still figuring out how everyone else does it, much less how to find my own way of walking. It's a bit scary to be honest, and I've always felt like I was in the lead, always the first one to learn how to walk and then teach others.

I've never had any good male role models that I looked up to growing up. In fact, the males I do look up to now tend to be males younger than me, especially my brother and my cousin. I know I've influenced them to a great extent, but I'm not sure they know how much they have influenced me. I think I'll write them a poem or something.

It means I had to find my own role models, and mix and match qualities of men I cared about to create a picture of what good men do, and how they should treat me, you know, since I like men and all. This is still hard to do, partly because of culture, partly because of assumptions, and also to a large part with men not exactly being able or willing to express their emotions as openly as women are allowed/expected to.

This unwillingness can be so frustrating for me at times. As men, we are trained to bottle things up, to always be strong, to never cry, and especially to not show emotion. I wish feeling vulnerable, feeling affectionate, and feeling very emotional weren't associated with shame, that would help men out a lot.

The emotional and physical changes I'm undergoing are not uncommon, in fact they are very common in men. Trouble is, nobody really talks about or expresses it, not in modern society anyway. It has been very difficult and required a ton of my own effort to find decent resources on men's health. And I mean a more integrated approach to men's health, not just bulking up so you can get laid and be a testosterone pump forever trying to keep young because it is easier to die young and buff than face your emotions. When most men would run away or occupy themselves to get away from what they feel, I would always walk right into it. I never understood why you would try and run away from something you could never escape, no amount of modern tinkering is ever gonna distract us away from who we are. I can thank my mother for never allowing me to be afraid of trying to know myself.

But now I find myself in a bit of a lonely place, where I know what I feel, but I don't have many other men to share it with. I wish I had better access to men's groups. Has a lot to do with the fact that I live on an island where the age range jumps from 15 to 50 with nothing in between, not to mention the Japanese cultural influences on men's emotions as well. The older generation is quite conservative in that they can't give me a ton of advice or a listening ear about relationships since marriage for them exists in this state of post war glory, a duty not a thing you can necessarily choose. If I do talk to them, I tend to end up being the role model, and they envy my free spirit and zest for life, as well as my youth. I want someone to talk to, not someone to envy me. As for the young folks, their smiles and laughter keep me vibrant and hopeful, but they are barely developing, refining their craft by jumbling it all up and learning from that. I no longer need to jumble things up as much in order to learn, and I have quite a life I've lived to give me lots of related experience in just about any situation. The young folk may be awesome, but they lack experience, because they are essentially just kids laughing and playing, as it should be.

That's great, but now who can I talk to about this or share how I'm feeling? Sometimes it feels like I passed a point of diminishing returns. Where I exceeded all expectations to the point where I went way past any former role models. I know it's not really diminishing returns though, but I can't help feeling like it is sometimes. Which brings me back to men.

I never had much of a father figure growing up. At least I never had a father figure I agreed with or wanted to be like, even in just a few ways. Much of the reason I left home to explore life for myself was because I didn't want to end up like my father or stepdad. I spent a lot of years hating and running away from them, only to finally realize after many years that they are also people, and they did the best with what they felt was right, as hot headed and dumb as that was most of the time. I grew up around a ton of macho men who never wanted to show any emotion. It never worked, because as soon as they were trashed drunk, they were emotional messes, and you could tell that all that bottling up took a huge toll on them, mainly because there were very few outlets for them to openly express their emotions. Men aren't supposed to ever need anything after all, so the story goes.

I guess I never fit the typical man format. It took a ton of years for me to be able to realize that it was okay how to express how I felt, and that there were ways of doing it that were not self-destructive or so intense it burned bridges. I was also fortunate and determined enough to move to New York so young and met tons of queer folk like myself. I was able to better develop those parts of myself that would never have had a voice had I not lived in New York. It was nice to have genuine friendships with other men who liked men, and to talk about all our feelings openly. Some people like to believe in luck, that somehow I magically acquired all the resources to be the person I am today. They may assume that I always felt safe, have always been confident, that I never thought I would fail, and that I always persevered in everything I did. But in fact, the opposite is true. I grew up quite "poor" monetarily speaking, I would fear things so much sometimes that I would not move, I have failed immensely time and time again, and I have burned many bridges. That my quiet cool headed nature has always been so strong is not true, it took many years of reworking and perfecting my art to get here, and I am aware that I am always changing. It never stops, and there is never any permanent way I can feel that will be "the end" of feeling.

So where do I go to find like minded people? We're a mysterious kind my lot, and we all know we exist, but we tend to be dispersed so much and in our own realms that sometimes it's hard to find each other. But when we do, those bonds tend to be for life, or at least very strong for the time we interact, and we never stop caring for each other in our own ways. That was something I had to learn for myself, I couldn't exactly learn what love meant to me without figuring it out for myself.

I'm feeling a bit of internal pressure to be around men I admire. It's difficult, because the men I care deeply about are physically far away, even if they are close in my heart. One of the things I do love the most about those connections is that the silence between us is powerful. It's what we don't say, and what we do for each other that is the most meaningful. I love sleeping next to my brother or cousin or just being physically close to and touching each other because it's a reminder that we are there for and love each other. Paradoxically, it's what we don't say that means more to us than words. I still feel like a baby that just learned how to walk, but at least I know I'm not doing it alone. The others are cheering me on, and though I have a hard time finding male role models I can relate to, I always seem to find a strength within myself. I still wish I had a men's group, but I feel much better now that I typed out what I was feeling, and that's the first step in learning how to walk.