Sunday, January 26, 2014

Just Who The Fuck Do You Think You Are?

His face was beet red.  This wasn't bullshitting me, he was genuinely angry.  My roommate really was kicking me out.

"I don't want to come home to some kind of mess.  You're really selfish.  How could you do that to me, to the people who care about you?"

It wouldn't be the last time I heard those things.  Nearly everyone that remained in my admittedly shattered life said pretty much the same thing.  And reacted in much the same way.

They ejected me from their lives.

My own father committed suicide when I was eighteen, and I remember feeling these exact same feelings, blaming him for taking the cowardly way out, for not thinking what it would do to me, his son he barely knew.  Since then, I have heard many times how mental illness runs in the family, how suicide can be 'contagious', all of it, really.

And as the child of a suicide victim, a man who was removed from my life and remained broken from that time until his death, I have seen this rationalization used many times.  As the mantra goes these days, correlation is not causation, and here it applies beautifully.  This is a moral resting stop, not an answer. 

Like most who end up in Hospital for self harm, I have struggled for years, decades really, with depression.  For the longest time I thought I was the wimp I was told I was for being so 'weepy' (morose really, since I never cried).  The 'fact' that I was never going to amount to anything became a self fulfilling prophecy, in many ways.

Like many depressives who believe they don't deserve good things, I had a tendency to self destruct whenever things started looking up.  I still, to this day, actively reject women who openly express interest - in an unthinking, kneejerk sort of way - likely out of some misplaced self preservation mechanism.  I have developed all sorts of weird habits over the years of isolation and depression that make it a little harder to re-acclimate to 'normal' society.

This made me a somewhat difficult person to know, to say the least.



The key to understanding a better approach, in my view, is to admit we simply don't listen to men when they say they are hurting, and do nothing even when we get the message.  It was certainly the case for me, at any rate.  It took a guy 2000 miles away to give enough of a shit to get me into Hospital.  Pretty much everyone closer kind of stuck their fingers in their ears.  They really didn't want to hear it.

Of course, once I got out of Hospital, I was inundated with people who were concerned and 'knew there was something off'.  None of them had an answer when I asked them why they didn't do anything to help then?  The most common response was a vague fear of intruding.

Now, the people I know, or more to the point knew, are not hard assed jerks, they are normal, average people.  They were presented with a scenario that shocked them into discomfort, and it was 'better' to get rid of me than confront it.  Mostly, because to be honest there is almost no information on HOW to confront it, or even recognize it.

When I was in Hospital, there were a few staff members that were interested in the potential of the MRM/Manosphere to get the word out, the best info available, directly into the hands of the men and women most likely to be confronted with these realities.  At the time, I was busy finding a new place to live, then a new job, then paying off debts (ok, still in this phase, but I'm optimistic), and could not do what i have been planning for a while.

You see, people who are on the verge of killing themselves don't usually have great lives to begin with.  Most are men, and most of those have a bleak future, full of struggle and hard work devoid of meaning.  Many of these men reached the point they are at after multiple attempts to get help, from whoever would listen.  I can personally attest that the vast majority of Governmental programs to provide support while rebuilding ones life, specifically exclude white males, for example, for ideological reasons. 

But really, society in general not only ignores men and boys expressing pain, often we actively shame or ridicule such things.  Then wonder why the 'tough love' didn't work.

What I aim to work toward, is gathering and disseminating good information on male depression and anxiety.  I aim to make use of the Manosphere, to get good information out there to those who need it.  Because men are dying, and that need not be the case.  Because men who escape the blackness should not lose their friends because of it, or employment, or housing.

Those men deserve help getting back on their feet, not have them kicked out from under. 

2 comments:

  1. Though building toughness has its place. First the wounds must be healed. I wonder if there should be a 3 day mourning period after some tragedy where a man can cry as intensely as he wants then after that he is done.

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  2. The mind is just like the body. It requires a certain amount of strain to become stronger. But not so much that it is broken or hurt. A man can be stretched to his limits and able to endure and overcome greater hardship.

    Hardship forges some men but breaks others. It really depends on the person.

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