Guest post by George Bell
“My sense of what it means to be a man has played as the silent soundtrack to my whole life.”
It’s only in the last few years that I’ve paid full attention to that music. When I look back, I realise it’s always been there. Sometimes as an orchestra, a symphony in perfect harmony.
Other times it’s felt like like a band who’s just lost their drummer, or a guitar string has snapped. The music’s been off-kilter, out of tune, the lead singer’s forgotton the lyrics.
It sounds obvious and simplistic to say that how I am as a man has influenced everything in my life. Of course it has. That’s who I am. I am a man. The trouble is for me, and I know is an issue for so many men, is that for so long, the man I was and wanted to be didn’t match up to the narrow, rigid perception of a man that I thought I should be.
In some ways, I was living two lives. Doing things because of the man I was, and doing things because of the man I wanted others to see. So much of my life, perhaps all of it, has been influenced by this, so much so that whatever the thing was I was doing, that soundtrack of masculinity was always playing in the background.
This has been no more the case than a deep struggle I had with mental health issues a decade ago, culminating in a period where I thought suicide was my only option. I focused on recovering from the issues themselves, and when I did, that was my story for the next few years.
What I missed from that story was how my imbalanced sense of masculinity played into the whole thing, even caused it perhaps. Would I have got as bad as I did, would I have even got bad at all, if I had been more clear on my version of masculinity? Of my version of what a man could be? The honest truth is, I think I wouldn’t.
But it’s not just there where masculinity extended its reach. I downloaded Tinder and went on a date once to help me prove my masculinity to others, because all my mates were on it. I got lured into a job in London that I didn’t want, becasue I was working for someone from Dragon’s Den and I got to wear a suit. I thought that made me more of a man. I’ve lied and hidden hobbies I’ve had because I thought people would call me “gay”.
It’s made me question how much of my life I’ve lived for myself, and how much I’ve lived for others, for society’s perception of what it means to be a man.
I’ve tried a lot to bring balance to my life. I’ve been strong and resilient, I’ve been emotional and in a breakdown, I’ve been through therapy, I’ve done the classic “lad” things to try and fit in, I’ve gone too far the other way and tried to become “enlightened”. I’ve tried meditation, journaling, tech-detoxes, diets, courses, coaching and all other things (fad or otherwise) in the pursuit of being the optimal version of myself.
What I learnt along the way is that often we can have too much of all of this stuff. Was I a better person when I focused only on meditation, self-help books and growth, cutting out time socialising, Netflix, drinking beer? And trying to reject traditional masculinity?
I’m not so sure. Really, these things didn’t help me do the thing I actually needed to do; get a better understanding of myself and what my definition of being a man is. And paying more attention to the soundtrack of my life. Not to drown it out or to turn the volume down. But to learn the chords and the beat, so I could play along to the same tune. My tune, nobody else’s.
George Bell is a writer on men, men’s mental health and masculinity.
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