This a follow-up to an earlier post I made about… well, my process. After putting my thoughts and feelings all out there, I could look at them differently. Reading said post was like looking through a window into a house made out of victim-hood, defiance and dare I say it, misapplied positivity.

Now there’s a set of sensations you don’t see combined every day. Reading through the post initially felt like a personal manifesto. And honestly? It kind of was. A manifesto I should probably let go of.

That’s right. It has been less than a week and I’m already coming back from what came out of my own two hands. I know, I know, I’m a big hypocrite. Moving on.

The other post was pretty intense. However, this post described a large part of my process.

I’ve spent a long time navigating the landscape of modern day narratives. “Masculinity” means a lot of different things to different people. Dominance, leadership, oppression, agency. There are as many symbolic meanings as they are people to interpret them. But for me, it doesn’t mean anything in particular anymore.

Being a man just means being a man. Being masculine, for me, just means not hiding anymore. Refusing the victim narrative. I understand this is a far cry from what I wrote down only days ago, but change happens to us just as much as we make change happen by our own volition. Getting older means letting go of things that used to define us. We can’t choose our past, but we don’t have to let our past determine our future. And so, I choose to both heal and learn at the same time.

In turn, this means…. change. Change of some kind, anyway. I wanted to say “maturing”, but that would be too self-congratulatory, too smug. I guess I’m just getting accustomed to the state of my life. That’s the thing, isn’t it? Just being around for long enough, dealing with the same proverbial demons for this amount of time, makes it so that I get my experience from sheer attrition.

Long story short, I’m invariably being dragged into the next chapter of my life. I’m slowly distancing myself from old hurt and rejecting the unspoken victimhood I’ve been adopting for so long. This means closing the old chapter and entering something new. And this time, I want to feel like I’m actually in control. I will need to remind myself constantly that I do have agency, and it will be an entirely new way of life for me. But in my case, it would be a way of life that has been a long time coming.