A Certain Normal-ness
Thoughts on Healthy Manhood
There’s a quote out there that goes something like: “all great things start with a terrible first effort”. For me, and writing, this was definitely true.
The first time I wrote something and shared it publicly was 2019. I was six months into a new job through Venture for America. The job was hard, Detroit was cold, and altogether I was struggling1. One winter evening, I was laying in bed after a particularly challenging day. The old five-bedroom duplex I shared with four roommates2 came stock with wacky HVAC problems, redirecting any heat from the second floor up to the third. My bedroom, positioned at the top of the house, was an oven. I laid on my phone, scrolling through Kindle book titles as beads of sweat traced abstract images into my bedsheets.
It might have been the sweat. It might have been the outside cold. It might have been the difficult job or the totally absent social life. Whatever it was, I found a book written by Buzz Aldrin. The title, depressing as it was, sucked me in immediately as it shouted to readers in bold, Times-New-Roman font:
“Magnificent Desolation”
For the uninitiated, Buzz Aldrin’s life was complicated. He achieved about as much as any human in history: a doctorate in engineering from MIT, time as a Naval test pilot, and among the first group of men to set foot on the moon. But despite his accomplishments, he struggled for years as an alcoholic and a bit of a philanderer. The book documents the miserable life that followed his lunar adventure, and how he battled the chimera of clinical depression3.
As I read Buzz’s book, he spoke of his tension between public persona and reality. The world saw him as a man’s man, the type who always had an answer, the type who could handle anything. The pressure he felt to live up to this image was extraordinary and overpowering. He self-medicated to alleviate the anxiety - booze and women can be a hell of a bandaid.
I saw Aldrin’s tension and thought of my own life. I thought of my dad, a man who once broke someone’s nose while boxing in the Navy. He’s a high school superhero who blocked a field goal one Friday night by jumping on a lineman’s back. For every legend about Buzz Aldrin, I have ten about my dad.
I saw Aldrin’s tension, and realized it wasn’t exclusive to him.
I saw a story, and I wrote it.
I won’t rehash the same argument I made back in 2019 - if you’re interested, check the first footnote. A quick summary is: manhood was modeled for me by my dad. He was a man’s man, and I grew up wanting to be just like him. I was small and weak and prone to tears, though, so it took some learning. By my early twenties, I overshot a bit. I argued that the emotions Aldrin describes in his book were entirely reasonable, human emotions, but the kids who watched him on TV, walking on the moon, didn’t see those things. They saw the fearlessness, the accomplishment, the coolness-under-pressure that Tom Wolfe dubbed “the right stuff”, and there’s a certain virtue there that everyone should strive for.
That said, there’s also a certain normal-ness to feeling overwhelmed, sad, and powerless, the way Aldrin did later in his life. I argued that those same kids who watched Aldrin on the moon (and the kids who saw their dad as a football-playing superhero) should see a more nuanced version of those human emotions that come hand-in-hand with doing difficult things.
To me, that’s the essence of healthy masculinity.
That was my first attempt at writing publicly.
It was a complicated topic, and I did a halfway-decent job expressing my thoughts. That said, I wish I’d stressed a few things. Every virtue is a golden mean between two extremes. Traditional masculinity - things like courage, strength of will, aggression, and assertiveness? Those are good things. When taken to an extreme, they miss the mark a bit and can lead to dysfunction, but that doesn’t mean they’re things that should be avoided. People should strive to be like Buzz Aldrin. They should strive to be like my Dad. Those are good people who have accomplished really remarkable things because of these traits, not despite them.
So my argument is a “yes-and” situation: lean into those traits, and also recognize that the full-spectrum of humanness includes sadness, despair, and other negative emotions. Ignoring those things is where men like Aldrin are often led astray, amplifying virtuous traits into more problematic ones. Lean into those difficult emotions, too.
In Richard Reeves’ latest book, he writes about masculinity, noting that recent rhetoric treats it like a pathology. Like a problem to be avoided. From my own experience, discussions on healthy masculinity focus on behaviors to avoid, rarely ones to embrace. It’s hard to picture any other identity - gender or racial, for that matter - where this is normal and encouraged.
Classically masculine traits are remarkable. They’re guided us to the moon and back. They led Lewis and Clark across America and Washington through the brutal cold of Valley Forge. They’ll continue to shine as we venture toward bigger and better things.
Here’s to those bigger and better things.
I had just started seeing a therapist for the first time. He wasn’t very good in all honesty, but the co-pay was $20 per session. I stuck it out.
I was the only dude, living with four girls. Strange times all around.
Against a 1960s social backdrop, no less. Which had the emotional intelligence of, like, a grizzly bear.