A confession to an angry god

In theory, you should feel broken, pained, angered when witnessing the collapse of a marriage in real-time, right in front of you. Most would think to ask questions like, why? With who? How could you? Who do you think you are? Especially when it's your own family, you would think to feel as if your world was shattering bit-by-bit with each pump of your heart.

But I did none of that. I kept my mouth shut and said nothing. I felt numb; as detached as I ever was and blind as I've always been. I felt hollow, yes, but I knew I was going to survive, so I kept operating as if my life, my world, was still normal. Rather than sit on the bed with my own mother as she wept in pain, rather than hug my sister as she collapsed on the bed, instead of yelling at my father, I did what all men do when faced with the reckoning that is open honesty-I did nothing, shutting down as I stared out my parent's bedroom window.

Much as my dad was disconnected and disconnecting from the daily existence of our family, escaping to his own alternate reality he had built for himself, I escaped into my own mind. Much as my paternal grandfather before me fled into another country after committing violence towards my grandmother, I fled into stasis. Much as my maternal grandfather planted his roots in a life of illicit substances and crime, I planted my heart underground, far from the harsh light of vulnerability. I come from a long line of cowards.

But when you really boil it down, most men are cowards at heart; comfortable living in a society that nurtures our emotional detachment. We never grow up from being scared little boys, unwilling to show our needs, unwilling to ask for help, too scared to cry-never really. Each man in his own heart is fearful, some of one thing and some of many things, but men pray to a terrible god who demands we sacrifice our humanity, our love to prove ourselves worthy. The unfortunate fact is that many men never escape from the clutches of this vengeful bastard god whose blessings only cheapen us. To escape requires us to be more brutal in kind, an inward facing brutality that steels our hearts. Fortunate men who learn of this brutality know that only this brutal honesty is acceptable in this life, which has the potential for leaving us terribly exposed. For many of them, of us, the very idea of openly acknowledging the horrors we commit in tribute to our devil god is so frightening that our very souls twist and groan in anticipation of the painful vulnerability.

The coward in me, in men like me, is a wretched beast; a mangy, filthy, diseased monster who lurks in every decision, every thought, every want, every desire. The coward in me is ravenous, wants to gorge, wants to give himself over to drunken lechery. Us men, us cowards, know that it takes a lifetime of work to cast away that beast-to speak truth to our own fears, heartaches, anger and pain. But fear also dries our throats and tongues, strangling the words before our lips can move.

Maybe one day, men like me will learn to plant that fear, not to bury it, but to see it sprout and grow towards the light of feeling.

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On precarity: or, a tribute to Mike Rose

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The Devils on my shoulders