Being a man

Today I would like to write about something that is often boggeling my mind. It is about being a man, or rather how society defines a man. And it´s not the gender in itself that I am writing about here, it is more how the gender is "supposed" to act and be like in all kinds of situations. A typical man is a tough, hardworking and emotionally dull. He is never to show his emotions and absolutely under no circumstance cry.

Why?

I have never been able to fit into the small framework of being a real man. I have tried, and under a long period of time I thought that there was something seriously wrong with me. I could not simply go on with life and thinking only about work, because that made me sad. I could not go on in life and shut my emotions off, because that hurts. And I was never really tough. So all these things made me wonder and question stuff and stop trying to fit in. Still many people do and that is why I want to write about this, I think this is an important issue.

As I have mentioned in my earlier post I think that it is crucial to live life close to your emotions and feelings. This is why I am stressing this issue so much. Men are taught to deny their feelings, to shut them off and keep on living life as if nothing was wrong. But when people shut off emotions they do not go away, they are still there, ever so present as if you were a small child crying over a cookie. But still people choose to cut themselfs off from their inner feelings, because life gets "easier". What happens next is that they build walls to avoid certain feelings or emotion. Avoiding certain feelings is not that hard, it is simply painful, but when other people come around that invokes that feeling inside of you, what do you do? You judge, and this is when it gets interesting.

We are all good at judging other people, when something is strange, off or simply different in another person we judge them. We say that they are stupid, dumb or anything demeaning enough to make us feel better. The typical man is an expert at judging other people. You can see it everywhere, even on the internet, the constant bashing on feminism, the racism comments about muslims or anythings else that doesn´t fit "The Frame". But why? Why is this problem still affecting us in the 21st century? Are we not civilized or evolved enough to break away from these old patterns and beliefs?

I think we are and this is the time. This is the time to break away and leave all of these problems behind, to see that behind all judgement we are all the same. Many people will choose not to follow and resist the change to the bitter end. And again I stress that it is in the core of the emotion where the issue lies. People judge because they are afraid. They are afraid they will become the weird one if they don't critize them. They are afraid they will change and all off a sudden they stand there without their thick walls of judgemental behavior. And what is then left of the tough man they once were? Nothing, because that was all an illusion they built to keep them safe. To shut their emotions off and not to deal with what is theirs, their issues and their debt to this world. Deal with your own shit.

I am not saying that this is an easy step, it is a hard one. And even harder for people who've been told how to act and how to be ever since they were a child. I was lucky to have an understanding mother who've always been listening to me how silly or "unmanly" I ever felt. Not many people have that, many were simply told: "This is how life works. GO!". And then if something tough or challenging came up noone would be there for you to help you go through it. If noone is listening to you, how will you then be able to speak up about what feels wrong? You are a child, everything that is ok and normal to your parents is ok and normal to you. They are the all knowing idols who brought you to this world. So then it is set, it is passed on, the belief system, the pattern which has been in play for such a long time survives. This is also why so many people turn out just like their parents even if they never wanted it in the first place. They failed to go down to the core of the problem, the issue, the EMOTION.

So that's it, men breeds men in this hard world where only the most tough man survives and gets to stay on top of the others before someone better takes his place. And others (like me) are in the background, not even participating in this sick game of judgement, suffering, pain and stupidity because we can see through the illusion of what a man is supposed to be. Yet we are judged for being men sometimes, and that is of course feeding the whole procedure of separation in this world. We all need to see this, we all need to work on this, we are all the same, you can do this, hopefully you now understand more of all the underlying challenges of being a man. It is not natural, it is not always something that people actively choose. We are all products of a tainted society that promotes separation.