This was not where I was supposed to be. That much is obvious now.

I stood there with Cristina—the wife—by my side, clinging to the back wall of an impromptu auditorium in downtown Chicago. Scott Dikkers, the founder of The Onion, was sharing stories with a large crowd of fitness people.

This felt far safer than the convention floor, where I was supposed to be schmoozing. It was October 10, 2019, mere months before COVID would turn the world upside down.

At the time, I was still calling myself an email strategist, which was overselling my copywriting skills. To be more precise, I was styling myself as an email strategist for fitness organizations.

It made sense. I was good at copywriting, and I knew a lot about fitness since I spent most of the early 2000s climbing the ladder of the LA market.

That meant I also knew a lot about schmoozing, or so it seemed. I’d been trained to overcome the fear of approaching strangers from early days in Big Fitness.

“It’s a numbers game,” the more experienced membership counselor taught me about collecting leads from existing members. “You just ask everybody who walks by.”

I mean, he wasn’t wrong. I suddenly collected enough leads to get the sales manager off my jock. It was solid, white-knuckle advice.

Pretty sure I drank that night. I was drinking more at the time because I was trying to stop using cocaine and other drugs. I wanted more normal. Apparently, normal was the bottom of a tequila shot for me. Maybe three.

“Just to take off the edge,” I would say at the time, quoting some aggregate of movie lines.

But back to talking to strangers.

In the first few years of my time in fitness, I revisited this advice repeatedly: It’s a numbers game. Talk to many people, some will be cool, and a few will eventually convert.

It never suited me. Every time, something would rise up around my stomach area.

“You’ll get used to it,” would say my district manager. “It still happens to me some… gotta ignore it.”

A part of me did not like this, a very protective part. It (and other protector parts) would show up whenever I needed to approach strangers.

This part was not the problem. It was the solution.

It was the best solution my system could figure out to keep me safe from whatever pain it thought I couldn’t handle.

So I just stood there against the wall at the convention. I mean, “I love The Onion,” I told myself. “I’d hate to miss hearing this guy share his stories.”

Plus, there were pastries and coffee. So.

Eventually, Cristina and I found our way out onto the convention floor, where I engaged in some dialogue with the vendors. After all, they had no choice but to entertain me. Not a problem. A solution.

Needless to say, I was relieved to get out of there. Chicago offered so many delights - food, sights, and the train out of town.

What this reminds me of is something I’d learned early in recovery, something I often surface in coaching men. Most people think their problem with drinking is the drinking.

The advice is clear in that case. Maybe cut back. Maybe quit. Maybe go to AA or something? Solve “the problem.”

But alcohol was never the problem. It was the solution. It was the best solution our systems could figure out to keep us safe from whatever pain they thought we couldn’t handle.

And yet, from the comfort of our social media portals, we onboard advice in the form of hacks, best practices, and strategies that address solutions as if they were problems.

Sometimes these strategies work, at least in the short run, but that’s nothing to say of their durability. Never mind that most strategies aren’t treating problems. Not really.

The problem with the problem is that the problem is deeper than strategy or tactics. It’s something complex, and complexity can feel hard. It might even feel scary.

But we’re complex beings, built for complexity.

There’s a story I carry that illustrates an invitation into depth that’s so powerful, I’ve not been able to put it down. It speaks directly to this matter. Please begrudge me another story.

When Mingyur Rinpoche was young, he suffered panic attacks. The worst part was that he was a Rinpoche, which is something like royalty within the world of Tibetan Buddhism.

His father—a highly regarded leader—recommended to young Mingyur that he befriend his panic, an idea that sounds ridiculous on its face.

In his book, In Love With the World, Mingyur recounts the tale of sneaking out of his ashram to go live in a cave. This was very difficult for a man who had no money and had been attended to his whole life, but he did it, stealing away through a window in the night.

He nearly died, experiencing what many would call a near-death experience. Through trial by fire, deep meditation, and what amounts to a full surrender to his own demise, he figured out how to stop fighting his panic.

With a full acceptance of his nature, he learned to welcome his panic into his heart. In the book, he alludes to inviting it to tea, treating it less like an enemy to be beaten into submission and more like an uninvited houseguest.

When I first read this account, I couldn’t fathom how this concept worked in the real world. But the promise felt like unteathered freedom, the sort we all secretly pine for against our most challenging parts.

It begs the question: What if the problems I keep trying to solve were never really problems in the first place? What if they were the best solution my system could figure out at the time?

Panic was Mingyur’s system trying to protect him from feeling something scary, unaware that by its very nature it was creating something else very scary.

My drinking came from a part of me that saw only one way out, no matter the consequences.

What I wish I could do is tell you how to get there, how to push past all your apparent problems. For starters, I don’t think I’m there myself. Even if I were, I think this path is similar but wildly different for each of us.

But there is a trailhead being pointed to by Mingyur’s near-death story, and my own with alcohol. There is a something that it’s like to look deeper into our nature and understand more.

If there was an invitation on the table, this would be it.

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

One of the reasons I write is because I often struggle to articulate my thoughts. I’m a better listener than I am an orator, so writing feels safer. When speaking, even simple words allude me, which you’ll see if you watch this.

Still, I hope you find the exploration as interesting as I did. I’d somewhat braced for a debate on self-improvement versus self-unfoldment, and though we did touch on both, we never got bogged down in debate.

Thank you for this, Jason. I look forward to trying again soon.

And to you, thanks for being here.

~Damon

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As I picked up various objects, moving harriedly about the space of our new house, I imagined dropping off each item at its intended destination. You know, like Santa depositing candy into stockings.

Ugh. I even imagined that I’d be fucking jolly doing it.

If you ever see me being jolly, avoid. I don’t do jolly. It’s more likely me covering up just how not-jolly I feel. That or I have gas. In either case… best be safe.

But, back to me carrying around armfuls of random objects, my eyes darting around for more objects to “take on my way,” even as objects try to slip out of my arms. That’s when it hit me.

Christ, I’m holding all this shit.

And that realization did in this brain what thoughts do in many writers’ brains; I wondered what I was talking to myself about.

Am I talking about the objects in my arms, the places where they’re supposed to go, or everything else on my heart and in my mind at the same time? Or all of it?

I mean, fuck. It just seems true that what we hold can hold us down, depending on how much we’re holding and how much capacity we have. This seems true in every context of the meaning of the word… holding.

But it gets worse…

These objects of attention can also lock up our hearts in frozen isolation. They can cut us off from everything and everyone we care about, and what’s worse?

We can feel like we can’t set any of it down, because… what? (What, Damon?)

What will happen if I just set it all down? Will that actually solve anything? Am I supposed to believe I won’t just start picking up more shit eventually?

What’s the net-negative, worst outcome of all that I hold?

It’s how I show up for other people. Most acutely, it’s how I show up with my wife. I’m an asshole when I do this.

When I’m in this mental state, holding everything, it feels like productivity. To the people around me, it feels like Damon has turned into the Demon-spawn, and we should promptly burn him to ash or something.

Look, they’re not totally wrong. (But please, let’s set down the incendiary devices for the moment and be compassionate. For the kids. Okay, for the dogs then.)

This is the thing: What’s wise to do and what feels available to do are not the same.

Like… Hey, alcoholic, just put down the damn bottle, man.

Is this what I’m saying? Holding all of this is like some kind of twisted, best I could come up with solution, and not the actual problem. If my metaphor is right, alcoholism, then what pain is all the holding covering up?

Crap. Now I’ve gone full-bellybutton, and you never go full-bellybutton. There’s probably also something careless about getting all meta, but here I go anyway.

In my writing and in life, I want to let go of needing to be the knower. That’s not a dig on knowing or knowledge. Updating our relationship with what’s true is a precious value that often feels lost in recent years.

That said, I don’t need to be the guy who knows all the time, or most of the time. I could drop about 90% of my need to be the knower, like needing to know the answer to holding.

Worse than that is this pull into constant self-reflection.

What bothers me…

My objection is more about my own grappling with the constant pull into the navel, the place where many perfectly good essays and blogs go to die.

A friend of mine, Jim, someone who’s been a contributor to my development as a writer, once opined that we should “leave the navel-gazing to the bloggers,” an assertion that’s haunted me ever since.

I mean, I’d hate to be a… one of them. [insert: scared face emoji]

One of the hardest habits for me to break as a writer, just ask my editor, is that I constantly revert to being the knower. Professor Damon pokes his head into everything I write, smashing the story that I don’t need to be the knower, and undermining my intention to trust others.

I both hate his presence and feel powerfully compelled to defend it when it arises. It begs the question, where do I really stand? Why, too, on top of everything else, must I try to hold everyone’s interpretation of what I write?

I mean, come on.

Charitably to myself, part of me really feels like solving this holding thing will do something. A wiser part of me knows that there is something to be known in the just being with what is. Never mind that the needing to solve it is likely just another form of holding.

There is a something that it’s like to just be stuck holding, caught deliberating whether to put it all down or to pick up more. That something feels like being okay with not needing to have the answer, to not needing to get it right.

This is where I believe I’ll find what it’s like to feel resourced, where I won’t need solutions or answers, where I’ll just be able to be okay feeling stuck and unsure, and this hope is what feels most alive as I write.

How this ends…

It may simply be true that I’ll never be able to protect anyone else from my less inviting parts, like the asshole Tyrant that comes out when I’m holding too much. That might even mean I forever have to face the shame of having such parts, which feels awful when I really focus on it.

When I’m really honest with myself about this, it’s clear that I don’t know how else to be. I could try to write some snappy ending to this essay, where I let Professor Damon dole out a treatise on five steps to not holding, but it would be a lie.

I don’t know how to do it. I can’t tell you how to let go. I wish I could. At least part of me does. It would mean, at the very least, that I’d figured out how to let go myself.

What’s more true is that seasons of my life seem more burdened by everything I try (and fail) to hold, whereas other seasons seem less so. I mostly wish for the latter, at least until I can find reconciliation with not wishing circumstances different from what they are.

This is a work in progress. I'll let you know if anything shifts.

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

Playing Stanley Kowalski was never my dream. It was Larry’s. Most of us called him “Nutter,” which was (and still is) his last name. Yes. Really.

Nutter had wanted to play Tennessee Williams’s famous character since it was suggested to him by a former professor, long before my time at Viterbo College. Yes, that was the name of the college I attended. Really.

The problem was that I was still built very much like a teenager at the time. That didn’t stop Larry from offering help.

“I’ll give you a program that’ll put fifteen pounds on you over the summer,” he said as if it were just that easy.

“Thanks,” I replied, thinking it all sounded intimidating.

Lifting weights wasn’t my thing. Sure, I’d done a little in gym class. I’d even once had a bench press and some dumbbells, acquired one Christmas. I maybe used them once, but I figured I could DIY a Kowalski bod.

So I worked out in the gym at my Mom’s condo building all summer.

But I didn’t get the part. To be honest, none of us theater dweebs stood a chance against Nutter. It was his destiny to play Stanley Kowalski.

The following summer, I stayed in La Crosse, the Wisconsin town where Viterbo was located. I spent days lifting at the school’s gym, cashing in on Nutter’s offer. I finally put on fifteen pounds that summer.

What I eventually figured out was that working out not only kept my body fit, but it also kept my mind fit. Eight years and one surrendered acting career later, I took a job as a personal trainer at the brand-new 24 Hour Fitness in Hollywood.

Change became my brand, facilitated through self-improvement. I was Captain Change Agenda, full of ideas for making anyone better.

Until I wasn’t

It wasn’t until age 49 and a half that I fully woke up to the limitations of self-improvement. Something bizarre happened, seemingly out of nowhere, causing me flu-like pain in my shoulders and arms.

Over the course of several weeks, I lost massive amounts of sleep, muscle, and upper-body functionality trying to figure out what was going on.

I wrote about it in this essay, but the short version is that I started with a dengue diagnosis, then pneumonia, and finally discovered that I’d suffered a cervical disc collapse.

By the time the neurologist put a chunk of metal in my neck to fix it, I was a fraction of my former self. What this taught me is the exact limitations of change agendas: One can recognize the impermanence of everything, but that won’t fix a broken radiator… or spinal disc.

In fairness to former me, I’d already learned a little bit from Buddhist philosophy about how change is always happening, and that all of our best intentions to control those changes only result in more suffering for us.

But let’s not castigate self-improvement entirely.

This isn’t just charity

Self-improvement creates a world with more people invested in their well-being, both physically and mentally. I submit myself as evidence to the jury.

The concern I have with self-improvement is that it starts from the position that I am broken and need to be made more whole. When our efforts to self-improve fail, we try to hone our efforts or double down, often spinning the flywheel of failure even harder.

There’s also a price to be paid for white-knuckling the steering wheel of every outcome in life, which is probably another essay, but worth pointing to.

More to the point, none of us wants to be the victim, like… I dunno, say… be the sort of person who surrenders to atrophy caused by a collapsed disc.

Fuck no. Fight, fight, fight… but in the space between the fighting, there’s something else one can do.

I’ve come to know it as unfoldment. Think seed versus automobile. A seed carries all the necessary parts to create a tree, provided the right environment. A car will only ever change through modifications.

If self-improvement is about adding something to oneself from out there somewhere, like modifications, unfoldment helps one recognize the depths of one's own resourcefulness as it exists right here and now.

Both have their place, but one gets a little more attention than the other. Oh, let’s be honest, nobody is talking about unfoldment.

We live in a world, especially online, that’s dominated by change agendas sold through how-to blogs and social media posts filled with top ten lists of tactics geared toward self-improvement.

Trying to execute them all is more exhausting than reading that last sentence.

Exhausted is the right word

Men that I work with in my coaching practice identify that this exhaustion is palpable, but they can’t imagine any way out of it apart from completely giving up. They feel caught between this and trying to improve their self-improvement plan.

The answer, I suspect, is not out there. It’s right here, but seeing it is a little like getting caught up in an intense show playing on a big screen. Sometimes, during a darker scene, you catch your own reflection and realize you’ve been caught up in a story.

Figuring out that we’re more resourced than we know, unfortunately, is a little more complex than this, though. In my own life, it has meant working with the parts of me that show up in response to dysregulated states.

If you don’t know what I mean by “dysregulated states,” read my last essay on the Tyrant I live with, which is short and amusing.

For me, it has meant not fighting those parts, not getting lost in the stories I tend to tell myself. It’s also meant getting to know what those parts of me are trying to make happen, and then recognizing them for that hard work.

That is when something different starts to unfold.

For me, this has been scary but fascinating work. It’s illuminating many of the flies hidden inside my self-improvement paradigms, raising questions in the process.

What if I really have been whole all along, and don’t need to be fixed?

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

As the massive butcher-block tabletop launched off the dolly I was pulling, I screamed “nooo” like I was in a car that suddenly swerved off the mountain road.

I knew there’d be damage. I hoped none of it had happened to me, but I knew the table was too soft to take such a drop without a scrape. Unlike real butcher block, made from hardwood, this was merely pine.

The road was littered with gravel, and the table hit it like there was dirty money riding on the fight, skidding to a stop. I just kinda crumbled, unable to look for a second.

I should’ve strapped it to the damn dolly.

This was the second move this table had endured, and the second such drop. The previous was far less dramatic.

[Spoiler alert: the side of the table was definitely damaged this time.]

Collecting myself, I loaded the 80-pound beast back on the dolly and, having secured the loose strap that had “tripped” the wheel, carted the load the remaining six yards to the front gate of the new house.

This was one of a couple of moments during a recent move where I simply lost. My. Shit.

If I weren’t so overtired and overspent, losing it would have manifested as sobbing. I mean—and maybe it had something to do with being a man—but I genuinely felt like crying. All that showed up was white-hot rage and stern resolution.

I’ll show them all. I’m getting this job done, come hell or high water.

Even after 51 years, this is how I cope with disregulation. Ugh. I hate that word, even as I find myself using it more recently. It’s the right word. I just resent that it comes out of my mouth. Excuse me. Part of me resents it (he said, spitting a little as he said the words).

Fucking parts.

At the surface, the problem seems to be the disregulation. It’s not, though. The problem, if that’s the right word, is all the parts that show up when disregulation is the way of being.

Some parts judge. Others bow their heads in compassionate awareness of what’s arising. Most are silent, lest they suffer the wrath of the tyrannical part of me, which is a culmination of a life lived neurodivergent.

And then there are all the parts that have a problem with that tyrant part.

Oh, this guy? Yeah. He’s a dick. Sure, he gets shit done, but don’t ask him a question when he’s focused.

That last one is the part that hates the tyrant. I know, because I hear from that part during moments like the table drop.

He says, and out loud, “I hate this version of me.”

If this all seems confusing, it’s probably because I’m still working through it myself.

What this work asks of us is much of what men struggle with in general: being open, vulnerable, and talking about feelings.

Feelings, especially intense, reactive ones, are evidence of parts.

What I see in men is that we generate parts draped in armor, some bearing weapons, and many of them ready to battle. As folks sometimes say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Parts keep us safe. They show up mostly as protector parts, with jobs around protecting us from experiencing something they think we can’t handle.

We might notice those protectors as critical parts, and on the more concerning side, we might notice them as the tough-guy parts. They may even be the violent parts of us.

Whatever their method, protector parts protect our hurt parts. These are the ones most of us, but men especially, are most uncomfortable with, so we—unwittingly—build armies of protectors to keep our whole system from touching those hurt parts.

For some of us, talking to a bulkhead of the Titanic would be more realistic than trying to convince protector parts that vulnerability is worth the effort.

The advice to men that they… be more vulnerable… sounds ridiculous in this context. We’re simply rousing their armies of protectors.

“Be more vulnerable” lands as “you’re not okay as you are” with protector parts. Once those parts are engaged, turning them off is like trying to muzzle an aggressive dog.

My inner tyrant will never surrender as long as someone (or another part of me) shows up to say how much he hates that version of me.

Just bearing witness does so much for these parts.

As such…

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

When I WhatsApp’d my friend JJ the other day, I mentioned that “I know I often share things more than once,” but that I was sure “I’d not shared this before.”

Wrong.

“Sorry to report, brother, but you did—in fact—already share this with me,” JJ replied.

This is not entirely new, but the incidents seem to be increasing over the last few years.

For the record, I’m 51 now. This feels a little early to be experiencing memory issues. If I were 80, even 75? I would expect some lapses, but at 51? Nah.

What I’m starting to suspect is that this is actually pretty normal for people in their 50s. It’s just that nobody talks about it. We try to hide it, but not super well. It peeks out in gaffes. I keep calling the little CrossFit corner at our gym “The Group X room.” No amount of self-criticism and cursing stops it.

In related news, Cristina (my wife, for those who are new here) started perimenopause soon after we met, in her thirties. She’s now postmenopausal, so I’ve had front-row seats at every stage.

Memory issues are often part of the symptoms, or so we think, but I wonder how much of it’s actually just aging.

Old age starts as early as our thirties.

Arthur C Brooks has written a couple of books on this. From Strength to Strength is the one that comes to mind, the part where he enlightens the readers about when “old” really starts.

Spoiler alert, it’s not your eighties. It’s also not your seventies. It’s not your fifties.

Old age can start around age 35. If this is true, some of the oldest Zoomers have about five years until something shifts.

On average, the peak of creative careers occurs at about twenty years after career inception, hence the finding that people usually start declining somewhere between thirty-five and fifty.

Brooks, Arthur C. - From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

Some are more fortunate.

To be sure, I looked around to see what other experts had to say about this. The second hit in my search results slapped me right in the gobbler:

Many people begin to notice changes in memory by around age 50.

Harvard Health Publishing (Aug 27, 2020)

This brings me to one of my most cherished acronyms: FFS

This is not something I’m making up. This is the bleeding edge of memory decline. Oh, nothing alarming. It’s just here, and what am I to do about it?

Cue all the bros suggesting neurotropics, sleep, exercise, intermittent fasting, micro-dosing, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Hey, thanks, bros. I appreciate the intention, but I check more wellness boxes than most Silicon Valley CEOs.

All that is to say, I don’t believe there’s much else I can do technologically that will make my situation better, not enough.

What’s being asked of me is to let go of the need to change circumstances, to find something like love and acceptance of what is. Simple concept, but let me be the first to say: This is not easy shit.

Do I know something like this already?

Rage is a feeling I’m familiar with, and perhaps a better model for talking about and confronting memory loss.

My whole life, as is often the case with many men, anger has felt like a problem. From an early age, I can remember feeling anger that demanded expression. I can remember noticing that it wasn’t just that I felt anger. I wanted the world to see just how angry I was. I wanted to externalize it.

This unnamed need has led to many instances of regret, throwing objects, slamming doors, and committing adult-sized tantrums. It’s the stuff of shame. It’s also often felt uncontrollable.

What I’ve come to understand through a variety of practices, Tibetan meditation, parts work, and constant insight inquiry, is that there is a very real part of me wanting to be seen when rage shows up.

Reconciling that part has felt mostly like failure, but I’ve come a long way. It wasn’t just about calming down through meditation. I can point to three major contributors that have shifted the experience of anger for me.

Learning to get space in whatever way possible, identifying and contacting the somatic (body-felt) quality of the rage, and practicing love and appreciation, in this case for the angry parts of me.

That last one is the hardest.

Can you be with it, man?

There’s a popular phrase being bandied about by the influencer crowd, inviting us to “be with” difficult circumstances.

It’s about the last thing anyone should say to me when I’m enraged, not if they value their life. I don’t think most of the people touting this advice even know what they mean by “being with” something.

This isn’t just sloppy advice; it can be dangerous. For folks living with trauma, even the lower-case-t version, being with something difficult can result in catastrophe without proper guidance.

Thankfully, my life has been mostly trauma-free. I’m able to notice body sensations without triggering anything.

In case you’re curious, rage arises mostly as the sensation of a hand gripping my esophagus, the finger tips digging in behind the passageway. It’s hot and rising, like acid reflux. I can also feel it like the hands of a large man gripping my trapezius muscles.

What’s not obvious is that noticing these sensations is the fastest exit ramp out of feeling the rage. When I have the wherewithal to do this, attention drops out of the rage narrative—the story I’m telling myself over and over about why I’m mad—and starts contacting the actual physical arising of the emotion.

Something like this is what I suspect is being asked of me with memory.

What does moving forward look like?

What might it be like to disengage with the story of my memory failures, the “Oh my god, is this the beginning of the end? Am I falling into early-onset dementia?”

I mean, maybe? And there’s a case to be made for talking to my doctor. Any real solutions to medical conditions would require something more than attunement to the unfolding now. There is no spiritual bypass for ailment.

Meanwhile, there’s a… something like noticing the handgrip on my throat. There’s an available peace in being with this present feeling of what it’s like to witness my memory fading.

This is what I’m being invited into. I just seem unclear on where to find the doorway.

Ultimately, we have to give it all back. Whatever it is we think we had was only borrowed, and never ours in a permanent sense. The sooner we reconcile ourselves to this truth, the less we’ll suffer along the way.

There is a version of the story where we empty our vaults of everything, real and imagined, smiling as we do it. It’s a seemingly willful leaning into something uncertain, but inevitable.

Like old age, it’s coming sooner than we imagine.

Sometimes I feel like it’s right here.

Thanks for being here,

Damon

When the school administrator said I would need to cut my long hair and remove my earring if I were to enroll, I knew this would be a very different trip to Guatemala.

This was my third and final trip there as a kid. Decades later, my wife and I would travel there for leisure, but this was about cultural exchange. You know how it goes: Spoiled American kid travels abroad to get his way and not adapt to the local culture.

On the two prior trips, ages 11 and 12, I spent the summer learning how to properly read Spanish aloud, as if I understood what I was reading. That, and I picked up a handful of swear words.

It’s shameful, really. I learned so little Spanish on any of those trips, but I learned something about my resilience.

The whole project would have been a wasted opportunity, but for the fact that I traveled there alone. I didn’t travel with adult delegates or a group of exchange students. I was there because my mother shoved me on a plane to stay with family friends down there.

There was something happening below the surface of all of this that I couldn’t see, something that was both already present and not realized that might have helped me in ways I couldn’t understand at the time. It had to do with initiation, a popular term in men’s work, something that wasn’t even on the radar for me at that age.

Sure, I was old enough to travel alone, but I lacked most of the spiritual deepening and insight that came later.

What was missing was a relationship with any depth of presence.

Boy’s Initiations

By age 11, I’d traveled internationally. This was an initiation of sorts, meaning it was a step into adulthood, to being a man.

There’s a compelling essay on non-traditional initiations experienced by real men by Stephen Bradford Long titled The Unacknowledged Initiations of Men. It has powerfully influenced my thinking on initiation and this essay.

What Stephen points to (there and in other essays, like this one) is how boys and men experience non-traditional forms of initiation that are just as valuable, if not more.

For context, there’s a subcultural movement lobbying for the value of initiations into manhood, even for grown-ass men. The Mankind Project is one such organization advocating for this, but there are many voices.

What’s often missing, as Bradford points out, is acknowledgment. There’s nobody who says, “I see you,” as in ”I acknowledge the hard thing you did.” I tend to agree with him on this point.

This non-acknowledgment has consequences, which are beyond the scope of this essay to outline, but suffice it to say it’s more than a lost opportunity. It sends a negative message that what one did doesn’t really matter.

Nobody says, “Hey, I know you were a little scared to fly alone to another country, but you did, and you did it well. You’re not yet an adult, but that’s adult-level work right there.”

As I’m now 51 years old, I don’t know what it’s like for such kids in this modern world. Maybe they do get this kind of acknowledgement, and maybe it lands. I suspect there’s more to this, though. There’s something else necessary.

In any case, many boys grow into men who feel like something is missing, men who find themselves searching. Despite having traveled abroad and alone, I’ve been this man in the past.

Man’s Initiations

These missed connections aren’t the only reason, but I believe they’re part of the reason some adult men just need to go camping with other men, share in that experience, and be witnessed for the effort.

No shade. I support these men getting what they need. There’s just something achy-back-shaped that’s always bothered me about tents, but especially the idea that there’s something necessary about campfires.

This fifty-one-year-old will not be sleeping on rocks or tree roots or even in a glammed-out tent on a deluxe cot to prove his worth. As my mother says, “A Motel 6 is my idea of roughing it these days.”

As such, it’s demonstrative of my cognitive bias that I’ve always smelled something religious about the stories shared by men who come away from male initiation retreats all fired up about what they’ve discovered.

In fact, until I read Bradford’s essays, I’d mostly hand-waved the whole notion. I mean, I was a goddamn Boy Scout. I’ve done my time in a tent. I’ve used a hatchet. I’ve burned shit.

For the most part, I’d considered the case closed until I stumbled upon a text in the support materials of the coach training I’m undertaking with the Aletheia School of Coaching.

… you will sometimes come across an experience that requires strength, courage, and bravery to fully face. When you first encounter such an experience you might default to feeling and thinking that you don’t have what it takes to face it. However, moments like this are initiations. When you face such situations and work through them, you demonstrate to yourself that indeed you do have what it takes.

Since then, I haven’t been able to stop coming back to this idea. It seems to be haunting me, even as it frees me from campfires and tents.

There’s nothing wrong with the culture of organizations like The Mankind Project. Any man who finds a deeper connection to his innate wholeness through any endeavor has my blessing.

But there may be something right here, already present, that simply deserves to be witnessed by another. It’s a part of us that’s toiling in the background, unrecognized for what it’s trying to do, unappreciated, and unloved.

If you don’t have the bandwidth or desire to read the Bradford essay I linked to above, just know that it’s full of accounts by men who’ve already grappled with experiences that required strength, courage, and bravery.

It’s easy for me to imagine that just airing those tales was enough for the men in them to feel seen for their bravery, and maybe that’s true, but as one commenter to the essay points out, it’s about more than being seen.

It feels like there is something else being smuggled into these formalized initiations, unnoticed, something of value that isn’t so obvious.

Presence

This is the missing ingredient in all our unrealized initiations.

It’s this complex concept, one that spans from what’s obvious to something less obvious. We tend to just call it presence. It’s a word that does a ton of heavy lifting, though, quietly in the background.

When it comes to initiation, depth of presence is the distinguishing feature, or what I would call our relational depth of presence.

There are generally three ways we think about it, but one more often than the rest. Most of the time, we’re just talking about being there, showing up. Bob was present.

That’s one end of the spectrum.

In the middle, we might speak about someone’s quality of presence, as in “Bob demonstrates a higher level of presence with a more qualified audience.” This is the larger gradient of the spectrum. It’s subjective to the person and situation, but we have an intuition about it.

We can even tell when we’re deeper in this form of presence, even if we can’t rate that depth. We can also intuit when others are deeper at times, as in “Bob seemed more present today than normal,” or “I was very deep in a state of presence during that event.”

This broad, and deeper than showing up quality of presence is what we crave. For men, at least, there’s something about a man who compels the attention of others simply by his depth of presence. It’s something we imagine all good leaders possess.

One can follow this scale all the way down from the first version mentioned to something that starts to sound spooky. That’s where we find the least often way we talk about it.

The best word I’ve found for it is field. There appears to be an ambient field of presence, like an electric or magnetic field. Anyone who has taken psychedelics will be familiar with this, but someone can notice this field without the use of mind-altering substances.

But. We needn’t grapple with esoteric and darker corners of presence to get what we want from it.

We can stick to the more pedestrian end, something just a smidge deeper than just being there. That’s a fine place to stay until we feel compelled to understand more, which may never come.

But this much I’m starting to believe is true about presence and initiation for men.

None of our initiations are as valuable in the absence of an awake and aware presence. It’s not enough to simply be there.

This is what I believe the critical commenter from Bradford’s essay was pointing to, albeit not directly.

Presence is never lost

We never lose it. It’s always available. And as long as we can remember them, we don’t lose our initiations either.

When, after my father moved out, I fixed the faucet or a broken electrical socket, it felt empowering. It also felt different to tell my best friend, but I wouldn’t argue that either of us knew a damn thing about this field of presence.

This moment didn’t feel like an initiation at the time.

Similarly, coming home from Guatemala and sharing with my friends about the trip, I felt some… thing shift, but it didn’t register as an initiation.

But from where I sit today, revisiting these inflexion points, I can do so from a deeper state of presence.

Doing so feels like getting a loyalty card stamped weeks after purchase because you forgot to bring your card at the time. It still counts. I think this is what Bradford was pointing to.

The process of witnessing my former self from my current depth of presence retroactively elevates these experiences to the level of realized initiations.

What I now understand from Aletheia is that this work is more powerfully experienced with another person, pointing us right back to the thesis of Bradford’s piece.

In such cases, nothing has been lost. Not permanently.

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

By the time I’d hit my brakes, the nest hidden in the rocks was already underneath the blue front tire of my silver BMX. In an instantly regrettable moment, I’d crushed several speckled eggs with my bike.

This would be the last time I chased a killdeer, an activity my dad had asked me to quit. Except for the crying and pleading with my dad to fix it, I don’t remember much else, just the hot splash of regret on my cheeks.

The way he tells the story, I asked him if he could fix them with tape. Probably true. I was about five or six when this happened, old enough to care about the fauna of suburban Minnesota, but young enough for this foolish accident.

I’d be lying if I told you I was over it by now. Just the little I’ve written above has surfaced childhood horror in my chest and throat.

Where my wife and I live now, Playa del Carmen, there are plovers on every beach. I know they’re plovers and not killdeer because Gemini told me so. Killdeer have two stripes on their necks. Plovers have one, and they’re smaller, but they look very similar.

They’re so similar that every time I see one scuttling along the sand, part of me recalls the nest incident, and I wince a little.

For my father’s part, I have to give the man credit. I pull no punches with him in my writing for a couple of reasons. He doesn’t read anything I write anymore, and I’ve already been frank with him about my feelings. As he rounds the corner of 90 this month, I doubt he remembers much.

That said, Dad taught me not to be cruel to defenseless creatures. This early lesson was all the convincing I needed that he was right.

I wish I could claim there were no exceptions after that.

When the cops arrived

The blue and red lights lit up the whole division outside my Mother’s house. I knew they were there for me, but I’d hoped they were only there to bust my neighbor, Chad. I knew I was guilty. We’d just egged a townhouse around the corner. It was the Pound family’s, where Joe Pound lived.

In case you’re not familiar—either because you were never prone to depravity or you didn’t live the banal-but-cruel existence that is suburbia—egging a house is just what it sounds like.

As an adult, I cringe ten different ways at the damage we caused to someone’s investment. Worse than that, I’m nauseated over what that must have felt like to the family and to Joe.

The fact is, I know the feeling. I’d felt it years before the egging incident, when our family returned from a long vacation to find our screened-in porch vandalized. I was maybe eight at the time.

It was petty damage, but as a kid, it terrified me. It felt like a violation of our sacred space. In fact, the day we found the damage, something weird happened.

My Dad sent me to the basement to retrieve an onion. The basement was scary. After barely opening the door to the staircase, I heard a ghost moaning and ran screaming into my dad’s arms.

The distinction is that I was a child. Joe was old enough to interpret our shitty intentions. How it all felt for him, I can only surmise.

The whole event was a confluence of ego (mine) and timing. Days before, my older brother had returned home from his job as a police reserve with a bunch of eggs, taken from some kids who’d been throwing them at each other. This tiny cache, and the fact that Mother was out for the evening, was my chance to bump my status.

Lest anyone wonder where my Dad was, he was living in North Carolina by then, having divorced my Mom around age 12. I was closer to 14 when this happened.

“Let’s egg Joe Pound’s house,” I whispered to my neighborhood pals, which included two visiting exchange students from Guatemala.

“We don’t have any eggs,” one of them whined.

“Don’t worry,” I assured them, running off and shouting, “I’ve got this!”

We egged and toilet-papered the Pound townhouse, but someone hit the wrong front door. It was that neighbor who called the cops. I would have fried for the act, but we had plans to go to an amusement park the next morning, and Mother felt trapped to let me go.

Needless to say, she was furious. Still is, I think.

It gets worse

Long before this, I was friends with Joe. If it wasn’t my own life, I’d say this whole thing reads like a shitty movie about teen angst, told through the metaphor of eggs.

Let me be clear. Joe was not one of the cool kids, but neither was I. Joe was just a hair less cool because he was awkward and “into computers.” Back then, geeks were way outside the norm. But he was smart, and he was kind, if not tolerant.

He also had the worst-smelling farts in the world. (Sorry. It’s a dumb boy thing.)

He used to rip broccoli farts while I’d sit next to him at his very 1980s computer. That’s where we’d hang out while he dialed into networks and... do stuff. I had no idea. Once, we committed credit card fraud and had to pay for some crap we ordered because his efforts to hide our identities didn’t work.

Joe was also into spooky shit, like developing a sixth sense. He once tried to help me memorize something for my Christian confirmation by recording pertinent information on a tape deck and playing it back after I fell asleep.

It didn’t work, but he was kind enough to wait until I fell asleep so we could complete the mission.

Honestly, I don’t remember if the egging came first or if my attempts to ostracize him in class did. I remember giving him hell in literature class, but I’m sure there were other times.

At the time, I was under the thumb of my own bully, Kit Riter, and wanted some cred. Joe was easy pickings.

Many years later, including the day I’m writing this essay, I attempted to find Joe online. I don’t know what I’d say, but it would certainly include an apology. Admittedly, part of me is petrified to find him. Facing my own cruelty and shitty integrity sounds like the warmer side of hell.

What makes it all the worstest, is that I doubt I’ll ever reconcile. Instead, I’ll live with the knowledge that I probably caused rupture with intentionality. I’d like to convince myself that Joe had developed a resilience to attacks by that point, but I’m sure it stung, all of it.

If there’s any evidence to the contrary, despite being one of the internet’s earliest adopters, Joe is nowhere to be found online. I’m sure he has his reasons. I’m sure it’s because of shit like eggings.

In some ways, I’m grateful that my Dad is too advanced in years to follow this. He’d likely struggle to know how to respond. I could feed him the word disappointment, but he wouldn’t use it. He’d say something about how boys act and wave his hand.

Who I’ve let down is the part of me that owns the lesson he taught me about cruelty. It’s the unformed dad in me, the one who will never get to hand down this message to my own kids.

Beyond any prospective damage to Joe and the disappointment my Dad might feel, it’s the version of me that’ll never be. That’s who I’ve really let down: He and the boys he might’ve raised.

And then there’s the shame of it all. One could excuse “the nest incident,” but by the time those eggs flew at Joe’s place, I fuckin’ knew better. I’d learned it the day I crushed those eggs in the nest.

At 51, it just feels like there’s so much unresolvable shit left on the table. What is a man to do with all his unresolved shit, and how will I ever forgive myself?

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

Hockey was not my sport, but there I was, at a professional hockey game in St. Louis. The girl I was with was someone I’d known since… gestation, basically. Our mothers both got pregnant around the same time.

The girl—let’s call her Tammy—was someone I’d taken to my senior prom in Minnesota just to make a splash. She reciprocated by taking me to hers, which was in Missouri. We were mostly friends, but through college, we’d kept an old-school correspondence. It was, at times, romantic.

When we finally reconnected at the end of my senior year, I was still so emotionally immature. I had no idea about stating my wants, especially with girls. Honestly, I don’t believe I even knew what I wanted.

In the case of Tammy, I think what I wanted was to know she was into me. My way of finding out was to grab her leg, trying to tickle her. Mid-game, after several attempts to provoke something like reciprocated contact, she yelled at me.

“Would you knock it off?” she yelled, barely audible over the crowd, but I heard it.

Rejected and shamed, I sat back and waited for the dumb game to end. When she dropped me off outside my hotel, once she was far enough away, I threw my backpack as far as I could and yelled at the sky.

That was the end of our connection and the end of our correspondence.

Eh. Who could blame her? How fucking annoying must that’ve been, a boy she may have actually liked, failing to simply speak his wants. I could write about them when at a safe distance, facilitated by the US Postal Service, but asking for what I wanted in person? That was a hard no for me, dawg.

This stretched far into the twenty-something version of me. I was a serial monogamist. Dating was not a strength. Asking women out felt like peak risk. Requesting intimacy was worse.

I simply didn’t have the necessary confidence to ask, unless the woman was strong enough to make moves from her side.

Growing up a boy

As a boy and a young man, I felt enormous pressure to be so many things with women. Be good-looking and confident, but don’t be a womanizer. Don’t objectify women. Also, make sure to listen to them and let them know they’re pretty. And finally, understand that it’s on you to make all the first moves.

As a boy raised by his mom, I knew plenty about bad men. Mother worked from an early age to raise my older brother. She’d had her fair share of run-ins with womanizing men, and that’s being superficial about it. These men were pigs.

If I knew anything as a teenager, I knew I didn’t want to become one of them.

There was also something about the culture of Minnesota that had an impact on this. Maybe it was just suburban life. We didn’t have the edge that city kids had. We learned to be passive-aggressive, and that’s being charitable. We really just learned passivity.

Boy, those fresh-baked cookies sure look like they turned out well, Ms. Whatever.

One doesn’t ask for what one wants in polite societies. It’s better to imply it, dance around the topic, and hint at the desire for something from someone. Let others decide if they are the ones to deliver.

This is low-risk, high-reward asking. If I get what I want in that situation, it’s at no risk to my ego. I don’t have to cope with rejection or worse, judgment.

This was all so problematic for healthy relations with women. Later in life, alcohol and drugs were useful. Even without a drink in me, alcohol gave me reps in being forward, but never so forward as to ask for someone’s number. Never enough to state my sexual wants.

At the time, I couldn’t have articulated why I couldn’t ask for what I wanted. I didn’t even know that this was a dragon worth slaying. Confront the fear, and overcome it? Scary.

The problems this caused extended beyond women. Until I figured it out, not asking for what I wanted hurt me in professional and interpersonal relationships as well.

The cost of this

The cost of all of this was so much lost opportunity to be a young man, take my lickings, and develop emotional resilience to rejection. It was also the abject loneliness I felt as a confused young man.

It would be my thirties before I’d get over any part of this.

A couple of years ago, still in my forties, I read the book No More Mister Nice Guy, by Dr. Robert Glover.

Another man had recommended it for my work as a coach working with men. Even though much of what the book proposed felt like conquered land for me by that point, it struck me that the book proposed a real problem for many men. It accurately described the boy and young man I’d been.

The consequences, I came to understand, ranged from lonely to dangerous men, with many points of dissatisfaction in between.

This was where a younger me had failed to understand what was missing from my interactions with girls and later women.

A central component of Glover’s book is covert contracts. Once I learned about them, I started seeing them everywhere. There’s a central problem with these agreements. Only one party is clear about them.

This was me tickling my friend.

It was me in my professional life, at least in the earlier part of it.

It was me, inebriated, with all bets off.

What this is like at 51

At this age, it would be so cool to brag about how far I’ve come, how sharp my want-stating has become. It would also be untrue, but it’s fair to say I’ve gotten better.

Fair, but not totally true. I still struggle to articulate my wants, even when I know them. I’m still afraid to climb out on that limb. I still enter into covert contracts. All the time.

There are still friendships left behind, like Tammy. How many friendships ended over this, I’ll never know.

My salvation is found in the work I do with men. There is this teeny-tiny territory of change I own outside of my self-development. It’s with men, who in their professional lives often have no trouble asking for what they want, but struggle to do so in their personal lives.

When I’m in dialogue with a man, either professionally or personally, I make a point to acknowledge when he can identify what he wants. I’ll even frame the statement in terms of my own want: “I want to acknowledge something you just said if that’s okay.”

Even better, when a man clearly states those wants, I make a point to celebrate in the most genuine, low-key way.

Most men pause when I do this, either because they think I’m making a big deal out of something simple or because they actually realize that what they’ve done was hard to do.

My hope is that I’m connecting with something in other men that learns, remodeling it just the tiniest bit. I hope that one-by-one, we—as those of us who get this—can inoculate men from this confusion by being the model and by celebrating success.

Honestly, though? It doesn’t feel like I’m the model.

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

The lecture from Mother hit differently this time. It wasn’t so much “You’ve been bad.” That was in there too, but mixed with a little, “How did I fail to teach you this?”

My basketball team had made it to the semi-finals and lost. There’d be no final finals for us. After we lined up to slap fives with the other team, chanting “good game” with all the sincerity of a chatbot, players began putting away equipment and grabbing their belongings.

One kid from my team cried. I was a cryer, and even I knew better. There’s no crying in basketball. I don’t remember exactly how it unfolded—lo these forty years hence—but I proceeded to let my feelings out through anger. I probably threw a basketball or two, kicked some stuff, and scrunched up my face to show everyone just how mad I was.

Nobody was impressed, especially not Mother. She would later inform me that this was not sportsmanlike. Crying was acceptable, but not anger.

Memories don’t age well, but I think that was the moment I actually started crying. I also may have just pouted harder or some combination of the two. It doesn’t matter. Mother was too late. I already knew the right way to see it: boys don’t cry.

My coach didn’t cry.

My Dad didn’t cry, even when he whacked his hand real good.

Even the other boys my age rarely cried.

In my work as a coach for men, I’ve developed some opinions and learned some truths about men. Lately, I’ve thought a lot about how vulnerability is trained out of men long before we lose our first game.

Similar to how little girls learn that their greatest asset is their looks, little boys learn that their emotional toughness is everything.

Let me be clear. Nobody formally teaches this. It’s just in the water.

Even enlightened men feel powerless to change

The net impact of this—at least for this man—is that even when an adult man understands that this has happened, there’s a limit to how much he can unspool the yarn. The stories we live with are too densely wrapped around our brains.

The parts of ourselves that work against our best intentions to be vulnerable rise up like a personal army to keep a man safe. Most of us simply don’t have the energy or motivation to resist, especially in a world that largely still validates our emotional toughness.

Hell. I’m one of those voices, even as I struggle against my own army of emotionally tough parts. On a recent Tolomen call—the men’s group I host—surrounded by a small group of trusted men, I battled back tears and apologized like I’d done something wrong.

On the call, I was sharing that I’d been in a state of depression for longer than I realized. It felt like a dark vessel of emotions held overhead, almost too distant to notice before, but now I could feel it. As I described this, tears rose up like a bruise, and my voice broke just slightly.

I knew I should lean into the feelings, but that personal army inside me guided my hands to wipe my face. It spoke in broken apologies through my vocal cords as if it were me.

The men’s faces broadcast unadulterated concern. Every furrow seemed to beg, "Stop apologizing,” and I tried to oblige, but it was too late. I’d already suppressed my crying.

Generation after generation, we mindlessly hand down this message to boys and other men: Don’t cry. Don’t drop your guard. Don’t be vulnerable.

It doesn’t just come from men. It comes from everyone and everywhere, until it starts coming from inside us. We start preaching it to other boys.

What this costs

What was lost on the call was the opportunity to share uncertainty and vulnerability with other men. I lost the chance to feel trust in other men to hold my most vulnerable emotions.

It’s the same message I inadvertently sent to the other basketball players that day our team lost: Crying is not acceptable. Externalizing anger is. I can imagine yet another kid seeing the one crying, and then me. Did he get the message that my reaction was the right one?

Every single time I’ve held back my vulnerability with another man, I’ve sent a message. I’ve been a carrier for this virus.

When, at the age of 18, one of my skateboarding friends was struck by a drunk driver, I struggled to surface the feelings that were there. The driver hit Steve so hard that he left his shoes on the side of the road, the first thing Steve’s mom saw when she arrived at the scene.

The day of the funeral, despite being a sensitive kid, I couldn’t let it out. Later that day, skating in downtown Minneapolis with my friends, I remember forcing tears out. It felt like deflating the end of an air mattress. Forced tears felt better than no tears, but not by much.

Where this ends

When I reflect on these stories, it mostly feels like we’re doomed to keep teaching boys not to cry.

Leaning back as far as I can, I see this as some kind of galaxy-wide emotional flywheel holding us back from what could come next if we could only stop the wheel and start something new.

A friend recently argued that this next generation of young men, some still boys, seems better equipped than we were.

I remember things differently. I remember being the eighteen-year-old who threw his arms around strangers to hug them. I remember feeling like we were the change, Gen X. We would usher in a new generation of men who didn’t fear vulnerability. I mean, that’s not how I would have put it at the time, but that’s the gist of it.

It’s not dissimilar from what seemed to be emerging from the late sixties and late seventies. That was another generation of young adult men bent on breaking gender norms, willing to brave their softer parts.

What happened to those hopeful young men?

I can only speak for myself. I worked in corporate long enough to learn that I needed to be more cautious. I was thoroughly exposed to all of HR’s well-intended warnings about closeness with team members.

Over time, I stopped trusting anything remotely vulnerable. It was all handshakes and fist bumps.

The mission

It’s tempting to try to put a neat bow on this essay, give readers something hopeful to hold onto. I’m sorry that I can’t do that. You deserve something nice to end on, but at this point, it feels pretty hopeless.

In some ways, I get why many men abandon vulnerability and embrace their inner caveman. It’s just easier. It’s the low bar so many expect me to trip on anyway.

And yet I am not done searching for a way in.

Just today, I spent a little time searching the socials for men hellbent on figuring this out. As beaten down as I feel on this, I can’t surrender the search. There has to be a way in, one that doesn’t sound like, “Men, you just need to embrace your feelings.”

This message isn’t wrong. It’s just not landing with its desired audience. Say it a million times, men aren’t hearing it. We need another way into this dialogue.

So, if you know of someone making this stand, someone affecting change for men of any age, making it okay for them to brave their vulnerable parts, please share.

I want to connect with these people. I want to ask them how. I want to steal what they are doing and spread that shit everywhere.

What could a world look like where little girls turn into women who know their value is tied to something other than their bodies, and boys who turn into men who don’t fear their vulnerabilities?

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

When I agreed to watch David Letterman’s interview with Will Smith, I was in no fighting mood. Mother wanted to watch it, and to be fair, I did once think highly of Smith.

The interview aired last year, but had been recorded before the famous Oscars slap. As the conversation unfolded, I was reminded of Smith’s charm. It’s no surprise that so many people used to want him around.

There was one part of the interview that really made me sit up, though. It was toward the end, where he described a particularly difficult Ayahuasca trip, one of 14 such “journeys” he took over the course of two years.

For those who don’t know, Ayahuasca is a Peruvian hallucinogen that lasts about eight hours, give or take, and is usually taken in the presence of a guide.

In Smith’s story, he’s hearing scary voices, losing everything that matters to him, and trying to get to his daughter, who’s crying out for him. It’s all a hallucination.

He shared what it was like for him:

"… I’m totally calm, even though there’s hell going on in my mind. When I came out of it, I realized that anything that happens in my life, I can handle it.”

The topic of The Slap Heard Round the World is very dated as of this writing. Sorry about that. You know what, though? It still stings. He broke my fucking heart that night.

What struck me during the Letterman interview was how much he believed that bullshit he spat out about what he could handle. It’s not a stretch to argue that Smith elevated himself to a godlike knowing, and damn it sounded good for a second. It was a good story.

We all do this. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, who others are, and what is happening all the time. It’s beautiful. It can also be a damn problem.

Stories are everything

Nobody has to tell this writer. Stories are great.

This is what the brain does with the raw information received. It creates an opus of narratives to understand the world. Most are less like books and more like simple associations.

Stories connect us to the world around us, the people, and the events. Some would argue that stories are the exclusive content of our experience, that there really is nothing else. That’s a fun thought to explore.

Also, stories can carry a risk.

As I developed my meditation practice, I started to believe I would one day graduate from anger. In case you’re wondering, I do still get angry, and unskillfully so at times.

This story did little to hurt me or anyone else, perhaps because… luck. I’ve not yet had to test my anger management as it relates to another person. Mostly, I’ve just learned that I’m still human after all. Thankfully, I’ve been less likely to throw something in recent years.

This makes me wonder, though. What’s the risk of the story I’m telling myself? What exactly makes a story more risky than another? And where is the damn baby in this bathwater?

Superhuman stories

When Cristina (wifeperson) and I left the US in 2012, it was because of one simple philosophy: We didn’t want to spend our lives working to the bone, hoping we’d one day earn our freedom through retirement, at an age where we’d be too old to appreciate it.

Speaking of stories, when I considered the stories I told myself about my skills in business, it seemed like gaining a foothold in Costa Rica would be easy. I’d been running a multi-million dollar fitness club for a few years, and knew what I was doing. At one point, I’d managed a team of 75 personal trainers. I could sell. I could operate. I could pour a badass drink.

How hard could it be?

“You can buy a bar on the beach for $10,000 US,” my Costa Rican friend Gustavo had told me one night of drinking. “$20,000 will buy you a really nice one.”

Who was I to argue with a Costa Rican?

The thing is, at that point, he’d not lived there since he was a boy, and the country had changed since then. By the time Cristina and I arrived, the going rate for a beach dive was closer to $300,000 US.

We had about $80,000 liquid so we did a little side business with someone we trusted in an attempt to fluff our capital. Let me skip to the end: He grifted us for the larger portion of our savings.

We were suddenly stuck in Costa Rica with our dog and what was left of our belongings; we didn’t have enough capital to buy even a small bar. We managed to make it, though. We liquidated our retirement funds and scratched together enough to buy a small pizzeria. It was so small that only one or two people could work there.

Cristina ran the business, and I started writing for a local marketing company to make ends meet. For years, money was tight.

Speaking of stories, I’ll never forget the time I bought a new pair of flip-flops. We had so little that extras felt like luxuries, even if they were mostly plastic crap.

In the long run, it would take us a full eight years to fully recover that loss. In truth, in some ways, we are still recovering. As our friends back home buy second and third homes, we’re still renting.

“Gaining a foothold in Costa Rica would be easy.”

“How hard could it be?”

Men on a ledge

There’s nothing superhuman about hiking along a cliff. I know, but I love it. There’s something about skirting the edge of danger, overlooking an unfathomable view fit only for the gods.

This was where I (and Cristina) put our lives when we moved to Costa Rica: a ledge.

It’s the same harrowing space I felt Smith step out onto when he made the claim that he could handle anything. It’s the same way I felt when I realized our business partner could not account for tens of thousands of dollars, money I’d willingly handed him.

Standing on a cliff’s edge, there’s actually more than one view: the one to the horizon, and the one straight down.

Looking back, I wish I’d been more invested in the view down. I only imagined the best outcomes, a cheap bar, and an endless supply of booze and blow. I never considered what actually losing our footing could be like.

It makes me wonder how Smith considers that night at the Oscars. How does he think about the story he told himself about what he could handle, or if he even does think about it?

When we sold all the things we owned, including the condo and the cars, I believed beyond a shred of a doubt that we would own Costa Rica in due time. Not literally. Just, we’d do well. It would be easy.

It cost us so much, I find it hard to let it go. I find it hard not to feel regret. If I’m grateful for anything, it’s that it all happened in private, not in front of a televised audience.

Recently, Cristina and I discussed plans for our future.

It was full of so much potential, moves we would make, and rewards we hoped to reap. When I asked her to consider what we would do when it didn’t go our way, for a moment, the only sound was the water dispenser compressor.

It’s lovely to hope for the best. That makes sense, but we’re also too damn old for ledges anymore. Thankfully, Cristina feels the same. Reluctantly, we hammered out a worst-case scenario plan.

There’s one story I don’t regret telling myself, one potential baby in this murky tub.

I’m so grateful that I’m not out here alone, handling things.

The first porno mag I saw remains a memory of significance. It was about as instructive as the time I socked an older kid in the mouth to make him stop bullying me.

Both are more like faded tableaus, mostly carried by the stories I keep about them. Neither was as impactful as the conversations I never had with older men. It’s not that my life was absent of men; there were just none I wanted to listen to, not as a teenager.

Sure. There was my Uncle Jack, but if you’ve read any of my previous essays—like this one or this one—you’ll know my Uncle Jack and I had a sordid relationship.

There was also my older brother, Dan. He was seven years my senior, an awkward spread for being my buddy or my mentor. I love my brother and hold nothing against him. If I were him, I would’ve beaten that version of me into a pulp, on the regular. I was a hyperactive monster and manipulator.

Not long ago, Dan tried to apologize for abandoning me during my teen years, but I never felt like he owed me anything. He was a young man with designs on getting out there.

Finding men of influence has always been a case-by-case consideration for me. I usually got it wrong too, like looking for a mentor in the man who owned the small garage where I worked. Don’t get me wrong. Tom was a good man, but not the right fit. The list is long, though: Men I tried to make into Daddy.

Without a father figure, my ascent into manhood reads like an episode of Police Squad, one where I’m Frank Drebin stumbling into manhood by accidental fortune. No older man counseled me to take up an exercise practice. No mentor taught me to meditate. These things just sorta happened for me.

On the other side of the matter, I could’ve spent time in jail for various reasons.

All of this makes me wonder if we’re wise to hope for older men to be the guides boys need. Sometimes I find a story can shed some light on my thoughts.

Sexual Deviancy

“Do you wanna see why I spend so much time in the bathroom?” Dan asked me once he was sure our parents had pulled out of the driveway.

I must’ve been about eight. “Sure,” I shrugged.

That was the day I learned that there were magazines full of naked adult women. Up until then, I’d only ever seen my Mother and a handful of rando adult women naked, mostly at an age too young to really care.

That day, however? I noticed. A very particular part of me stood at full attention through my shorts. My brother laughed and pointed.

Brothers. Nothing beats the comedy found in a fart to the face or a boner at the wrong time. I got a lot of both growing up, especially after finding Dad’s porno mags. I mean the boners, of course. Farts were my brother’s domain.

When Mom and Dad split up around age 12, Dad took most of those magazines with him. This would leave a huge gap in my porn experience for about six years.

Then they invented the internet.

In the years since, I’ve aged out of most sexual obsession, but I still carry a somewhat unhealthy relationship with it. There’s a part of me that still sees women as objects and goals. I try to be understanding of that confused and hard-working, eight-year-old part of the Damon experience.

That part has no wisdom to interpret. It’s due to the presence of other parts, like the various critical ones and the more evolved ones, that I have any epistemology at all. Those other parts keep the eight-year-old part in check.

Had there been a man in my life at that age with the wisdom to help me interpret what I was feeling, perhaps this adult me would be less burdened.

I can only imagine the conversation, but it would go something like this:

Son, everything you're feeling is normal. Unfortunately, you’re a little young to confront these feelings. You’ve stumbled into adult matters. You’ve not done anything wrong. I have. It’s my fault, and I’m sorry. Your brain and body need time to develop. This is hard to understand, I know. Understand this, though. We can talk about this whenever you want to. I’m your Dad, and that’s my job.

Fighting

My main bully was Kit Riter, but he wasn’t the first or last.

One of the more impactful bullies was a kid I never really knew. I must have been seven or eight, and in summer school. This older boy was in the bus seat in front of me, teasing me over the seat.

When I’d had enough, I hauled off on his nose with my fist. He immediately started crying and sat back down. Exiting the bus at my stop, I skipped home that day.

That pride was dashed when Mother’s response was disappointment.

“We raised you better than this,” she said, her eyes concerned.

Dad was also disappointed. I don’t think he was even secretly proud of me. I’d fucked up, and I knew better.

Fighting is beneath me, even if the kid is older and he had it coming.

Karate classes were a big deal in the 80s, but I wasn’t allowed. Instead, I took theater and dance lessons. Violence was not on the menu in our house. Honestly, I don’t know how interested I would’ve been anyway. I was scared of getting hit.

Dan had his share of scuffles growing up. I worked hard not to be a bad boy, and it didn’t come easy. I had problems enough with my persistent case of antsy pants. Fighting seemed an easy infraction to avoid, and even easier points to score with my parents.

“At least he doesn’t fight with other boys,” I could imagine them saying, looking back.

If I had a boy, I‘d let him take at least one karate class. I wouldn’t insist, but I would let him if he wanted to, but there’d be conditions. The first fight he ever initiated would be the end of it.

This is what I imagine I would say to him, and often:

Son, fighting is what happens when communication fails. Mastering how to listen with curiosity and compassion, and how to speak with clarity, matters at least as much as your fighting skills. Fighting comes second, but only when you’ve really tried everything else, including walking away. There may come a time when you have no other option. The fight ends once you’ve gained control.

Dads

In my work, I have the honor of working with many dads. I couldn’t do what they do. They sacrifice like I’ve never had to. Oh, sure. I would have likely stepped up, but it’s hard to see it from where I stand.

One thing I am clear on. I feel like I have no standing to criticize, not those dads, and not my own father. I feel like I have zero right to tell any man how to be a man. I have ideas and stories about what I think I know, but it feels like I have no authority.

Like the men I work with, we’re confronting the unknown and un-faced parts of ourselves. They’re the eight-year-old boys we once were, the ones who had to face adult situations with a child’s wisdom. The farther back we go, the harder that ask.

Why are we confused about this? Our Dads’ Dads were not more in touch with their vulnerable parts.

This being true, who among us could be the authority on men?

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

It was mere fortune that Mother and I split ways at the Atlanta airport returning from Turks and Caicos. My connection was home to LA, hers to Minnesota. Fortune, because immigration said something startling.

“Damon!” He practically sang. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“Oh?” I replied, flipping through files in my head for a reason.

“Do you mind if I look through your bag?”

“Nope,” I replied without hesitation. I’d done a little cocaine on the island, but I didn’t imagine they’d be pulling a blood sample. As he nosed around, I asked, “Any reason you’re ‘expecting me’?”

“Didja have a little incident in San Ysidro recently?” he asked, grinning.

I stared at him like our dogs do when anyone opens a crunchy bag.

“The border of San Diego?” he added.

Months before this, I’d been detained for about six hours after walking over the border with steroid-filled syringes tucked in my motorcycle boots. I got away by paying a hefty fine.

The incident taught me a valuable lesson: don’t fuck around with border police.

This was my life in the early 2000s: work hard, fuck around harder. There was zero bandwidth for inner work. That would come much later, after the bough broke, in Costa Rica. You can read about it in this essay if you’re curious.

What I had achieved at the time was nothing short of a miracle. I moved to LA with a whole thousand dollars and everything I owned packed in my (2-seater) Honda DelSol.

After three years of partying on a poor man’s income in LA, a gym called 24 Hour Fitness hired me to be a trainer at their sparkling new Hollywood facility. I decided to fly straight for a couple of years to make sure I did well, just alcohol, but then something shifted.

They put me in management. Cue the big bucks. Cue me, on my 29th birthday, doing a bump of cocaine in the bathroom. Eventually, I was back in “the scene.”

This was all months before San Ysidro. The partying would ultimately continue until 2013. I got very good at partying responsibly, not perfectly, but I took far fewer uncalculated risks. For example, I’d take the subways or taxis to avoid drinking and driving. I only dealt with carefully vetted dealers, ones who were as careful as I.

At that time, shame wasn’t even on my radar. I was too in charge to bother.

Shame is a hard-working mile-marker on an otherwise unmarked road. It’s not even a crummy road. Sometimes it’s perfectly paved, ten lanes wide, with nobody else on it.

Change lanes without your turn signal. This road rules!

None of this was known to the version of me that sat on that cold-ass, concrete bench in San Ysidro. That version of me, same as the one in the Atlanta airport, felt that I just needed to fly a little straighter.

I believed all of this so powerfully that I nearly missed the call to wake up.

The story I tell myself

What we are is a complicated matter, but at the surface, one could argue that what we are is a story that we’re telling ourselves about who we are.

In the case of my sobriety—early days—I told myself that I maybe didn’t really have a problem because I didn’t have crazy stories like the ones I heard in AA. I even asked my first sponsor about this.

“Damon, you reached a point where your behavior was intolerable to you. That was enough.”

He was right, so this became the new story I told myself. Had he not been there, I don’t know what might’ve happened. Had I not been in that room to ask him, who knows what else might’ve happened.

In an alt universe, another me stumbled on the road to the meeting, ran home to bandage my foot, and then decided I didn’t really need to go in the first place.

I’m not as fucked up as those people. I don’t have a problem. I can go drink a beer right now and stop at one.

The problem with counterfactuals is that we can never know. Not really. So I tell myself a story today that I’m fortunate to have been there, to have had my sponsor there.

The arrival of shame

When I was a personal trainer, I had very deconditioned clients who’d complain during sessions that the work we were doing wasn’t targeting their muscles properly. Then, they’d come back and tell me how sore the muscle was two days later.

These were people out of touch with their bodies in so many ways that they couldn’t even perceive what was being felt at some deeper level.

This was me with shame. I turned alcoholism on its face by claiming proudly, “I’m a functional alcoholic,” and I was. I didn’t miss work or drop balls. Not yet, anyway.

In the last days of my work-hard, fuck around harder vocation, I called out sick one Monday morning. My body was trashed with severe dehydration from drinking. I couldn’t turn off the nausea.

This was mere weeks before leaving the US for Costa Rica in 2012, and the end of my last formal career. At that time, I felt no shame.

That wouldn’t show up until I started facing the music. For me, it wasn’t shame over what I’d done. Sure, there was plenty of that, but more impactful was the shame over what I’d gotten away with.

When my friend Tony went to jail a few years ago for manslaughter, the shame finally caught up to me. Tony had been in a head-on collision with a man who was a spouse and a father. The man flew through his windshield and died on the scene. Tony woke up in the ICU.

I’d driven drunk. Oh, and high. Not one DUI, even though I drove drunk through two checkpoints. Not one accident.

These days, I can barely talk about this without tearing up. Tony is serving my counterfactual time. It’s my fault he’s in prison. I’m part of the problem, or at least I was. I contributed, and he’s paying the price. It’s my bill.

Nobody can talk me out of this. Tony is serving my unaccounted-for jail time.

Getting out of jail

The only thing that could make this all go away for me is just one drink, and I ain’t going there. No, sir. Instead, I’ll live with my fortune, good and bad.

The story I try to tell myself these days is that I’m just lucky. Worse than serving time, I could be living with the permanent story of taking another’s life.

Speaking of what we can talk people out of, nobody can take that story from Tony, not even when he finally gets out. In fact, that might be its own kind of burden: a man is dead, and Tony gets to keep living his life. Me too.

What I am certain of is that Tony, like me, felt like he pretty much had everything in control before that incident. He was careful not to do anything that would harm someone else or himself. He had agency.

Whether he felt the shame, I don’t know for sure. Was he like me, ignoring it all until the soreness finally hit the shame muscle? Probably.

The most pernicious aspect of this feeling is that we can ignore it for the most part, especially in the cycle of abuse, where we can lose ourselves in distractions to not feel the hard shit.

Especially men. We’re telling ourselves a story about how we’re the masters of our world, pulling levers, breaking rules, working hard, and fucking around harder.

How long must one man carry on like this and still not know shame?

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

One man’s presence

Standing in the JCPenney’s at Rosedale Mall, I stared at a wall of appliances like one was going to raise its little appliance arm and shout in a cute electronic voice, “Pick me! Pick me!” The same thing had happened while staring at the earrings.

I had no idea what to get my mother. Adding to my sense of urgency, Uncle Jack was waiting, so I felt the urge to pick something. Ugh. Pick an-y-thing.

In the absence of my father, who’d moved out some years before, Uncle Jack had offered his chauffeuring and financial aid services to get a Christmas gift for my mother.

Don’t fawn over Uncle Jack. This was the same man who once mowed our near-acre of plot of grass a day early, “because it needed it.” Nevermind that I needed the pittance Mother paid me for the task. Uncle Jack may have been a saint that Xmas, but he was more known as my own personal character judge.

To Jack, I was the second failure my mother had raised. I had too much leash and not enough discipline. He loved to do stuff like steal my only source of allowance as a lesson, because he was a miserable sonofabitch (and part-time drunk).

But to me, that Christmas, he was the man I needed. His presence was powerful.

Presence is a somewhat popular term in my network, certainly amongst my clients and coaching pals. Despite this, I often struggle to articulate a clean definition of it.

This much I believe to be true, though: Our relationship with presence seems to resonate, both in our own life and in the lives of others. That much is clear from my experience with Uncle Jack, at least with the benefit of hindsight.

As a kid, however, it was confusing coming from a man I didn’t trust at all. I didn’t have enough insight at that age to understand that conflicting feelings toward one person were normal.

What Uncle Jack was unwittingly teaching me in the most subtle way was that presence can show up and be valuable even despite our worst character defects.

The sneaky value of presence

When the weekly men’s group that I facilitate meets, before we dive into whatever it is we plan to discuss, I lead the guys in a short presence anchoring practice. It’s a little like warming up and stretching to shoot hoops, except instead of our legs, we “warm up” our minds for the conversation.

The guys report that it helps them calm down and transition from their busy days into the intimate space of dialogue. It does the same for me.

It shouldn’t surprise me that in that space, and in the space of my coaching sessions, presence often makes it to the table as a strategy or goal. By simply introducing the word presence, it has this quiet gravitational effect, where men find themselves wanting more of it.

What’s happening? I’m not sure. I think there is already a fundamental value for presence that we each carry, even if we don’t articulate it that way. We know there’s a… something we want, something that feels more like being here in this moment. We just don’t talk about it. We also may not trust ourselves to get there.

That something is presence.

Imagine for a moment that you could press a button on your head that turned off the layers of chattering thoughts, dropping deep into a state of presence with this moment. Imagine you could hold onto that feeling and go about your day that way.

That’s the promise made by stepping into the feeling of presence for even a glimpse. It’s what happens in presence anchoring. For a moment, we imagine what it could feel like to stay anchored.

What happens in reality is that we stay somewhat moored, but to a loosely seated anchor that pulls along the seabed over time. It’s a bit like how dreams can seem so crystal clear when one wakes up, but by noon? We can hardly remember a thing.

In both cases, we might have a desire to return to that feeling, even when we don’t understand it. This is why I think presence teases its way into client conversations and goals.

The hard and easy of presence

There can be something undeniably spooky about all of this.

For the record: I’m allergic to spooky. I don’t just mean ghosts and spirits. Those, too, but I mean most of what falls under the category of metaphysical or spiritual.

No disrespect intended. People I regard highly find value in working with chakras, or they collect crystals, and may even burn sage to clear out evil spirits. It’s fine, and more power to those folks, but none of it’s my jam.

In this case—that of my Uncle Jack and of men in general—we’re talking about a very pedestrian concept of presence. It’s the kind we mean when we say things like, “Your presence was missed at the event last night,” or “Will my presence be required?”

It’s a little more than just being there in body.

There is an even harder part to all of this. For men, presence also happens to be a quality we keep abandoning, seemingly by accident. This is true, even as we each value it when pressed.

Me to any man: Do you feel like you show up with enough presence in your life?

Every Man: Well, I could always use more of it.

When it comes to presence in our own lives, we are the parched horse standing at the trough, not drinking. It’s nearly maddening if one pays close enough attention.

The obvious and begged question is: How does one fix this? The answer for me reads as something of a paradox, doing without doing. Stay with me.

Fixing the problem

At the risk of pissing you off, I’m not certain. Sorry.

Developing presence, as far as I can tell, is different for each of us. That said, I’m willing to share what has worked in my own life and the lives of the men I work with. Just know, your mileage may vary.

It may matter to share that I was diagnosed with ADHD in 1998. What I’m about to share with you is what I’ve stumbled upon as useful for my circumstance, which could serve as a kind of proving ground for the average distracted mind.

It’s simple: practice. Really, it’s all the practices that every expert talks about ad nauseam—exercise, diet, meditation, yadda-yadda-borrrring—but it’s mostly about practicing presence.

For me at least, this became much easier after I started a daily practice of meditation. Not right away, though. The first few years were more a matter of just keeping the habit. It was something closer to ten years before I noticed the glacial pace of change.

But here’s what I’ve come to know more recently. Presence isn’t so much a matter of fixing as it is about remembering.

The truly hard part about remembering is remembering to remember. That’s where each of us is going to need a different strategy. Admittedly, as a neurodivergent, I still sometimes struggle with it.

All of my practices have contributed to unfolding what was underneath the chaos of this neurodivergent mind. Each, in its own way, stemmed the flow of chaos (thoughts, anxiety, restlessness, distractedness) so that the Damon system could better ground itself in a state of presence.

This was not what was going on with my Uncle that Christmas.

What’s possible

For my Uncle Jack, there was a time when he sat in meditation. To what extent that changed his relationship with presence, I’ll never know. He wasn’t much of a sharer. I doubt it had anything to do with how he showed up at JCPenney’s.

That was just him doing what we all are capable of, almost by accident sometimes. We put on a hat and assume a kind of presence for a time. Then we lose it and go back to being what we tend to be otherwise, thirsty for this thing we struggle to identify.

Even after all the dopamine we get, and I’m sure Uncle Jack felt his share that day, we abandon the state of presence just as we came into it, accidentally.

We know there was a something for a moment, and that something felt good, but we don’t know how to get back to it. We might even earmark it for later, like I’ll come back to this when I get some free time, but it never comes.

That said, I do believe it’s possible to find our way back, just not in the way we tend to imagine.

It’s not as much about developing a skill, not fully. We already know how to be present. And it’s not about an act of will, unless we count something like the will to sit in meditation every day. (Remember, that’s just my way.)

It’s more about what we are able to stop doing. That’s the space in which presence can arise.

That’s a really simple, but tough concept to grasp for someone who hasn’t experienced it. I only wish you to know it’s possible. It’s possible to cultivate the conditions that give rise to presence more often.

If I could gift you anything this holiday season—Christmas, as I tend to celebrate it—it would be presence. It would be any percentage more of presence in your own life, and that of the people that matter to you.

Heck. Even my cranky Uncle was able to enjoy this. If we deserve anything, surely we all deserve as much.

Honestly, I wish I could end this essay there, neatly wrapped in a warm bow. You could close this and think, “Yeah, man,” and then just go back to your life without anything changing.

The real invitation on the table is something less clear. It’s the invitation to sort your own way through the paradox. There is a something there worth remembering to remember, and it’s not a matter of will power or just snapping out of it.

It’s a process. I’ve only shared mine with you, and in all its imperfection. I haven’t figured anything out, other than the fact that there is a something.

~Damon

When I came to, I was standing naked in the shower, but the shower was off. There was blood and feces on the floor, but that wasn’t the weirdest part.

I was screaming uncontrollably as I slapped my hand against the tiled wall, like I was trying to wake myself from a nightmare. I just may have been.

What I would later figure out was that the body had forced a vulnerability the mind couldn’t bear.

Four days earlier, on a Saturday, I’d had an aggressive hemorrhoidectomy. That’s the procedure they perform when one’s lifetime of hemorrhoids has become so problematic that removing them is the best option.

That word, best, is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. It’s debatable whether it’s true or not.

What is true is that I am very unsure about publishing this story. Part of me believes it is too graphic, and another worries about how vulnerable it makes me. I am, after all, a man. Vulnerable isn’t our preferred flavor of tea.

Perhaps that is exactly what’s worth drilling down into: Can men stay men and be vulnerable at the same time?

As I write this draft, I’m rounding out week four of recovery. It’s been exactly three weeks since the shower blackout incident, and all is not good.

Fun fact: It was week seven before I finally finished this essay. On top of wondering if I really wanted to share this story, especially considering how non-Christmassy this tale is, the task of writing has been too heavy a lift for most of my recovery.

Let’s back up a little.

My hemhorroidectomy was quite aggressive, so the recovery has been lengthy and maddening. This was my second such surgery. The first one was far less aggressive, which means the recovery was easier. The downside is that the less aggressive approach would have taken several surgeries to completely remove the problem.

That first surgery, I kept secret. Only my wife knew about it because I felt ashamed.

This one, I’m telling anyone who expresses interest, and for a couple of reasons.

1. It’s helping me feel less ashamed about something silly to feel shame over.

2. It might be useful to someone else. (Looking at you, brothers.)

By useful, I don’t mean that anyone will read this and then change their bathroom habits. Doubtful. I’ve known for years that my bathroom habits were problematic, especially after my first surgery, but I didn’t change.

What I will tell you is that smartphones are a real problem in this regard. That’s all I’ll say because you most likely know exactly what I mean.

What I mean by useful is that we might feel a little more comfortable talking about something so vulnerable. Other than our emotional traumas, there may be no part of our bodies more vulnerable than our holes, and the rectum is the most universally vulnerable of the bunch.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we each have one. None of us wants anything traumatic to happen there. Like, I dunno, the application of a scalpel to remove parts of the body.

Speaking of seeing one’s parts, I’ve come to believe that one hasn’t fully lived until one has witnessed a smiling surgeon holding up a small jar filled with melon-ball-shaped chunks of one's own meat.

What follows the surgery is 3-5 days of no bowel movements, then a very painful first bowel movement. You know, like the one that caused me to blackout.

It’s two weeks of extreme pain, then 2-3 more weeks of maddening inflammation and confusion in the bathroom. Then there’s the crappy sleep, the drop in muscle mass, decreased conditioning, and a persistent psychological warfare with reality.

My doctor prepared me for exactly none of this when he promised, “This is the last time you will have this surgery.” All I heard was “last time you will have this surgery.”

I’m in… was my general demeanor.

The day of the shower scene was a Wednesday. I’d been movement-free for about three whole days. By movement-free, I mean all movement, and by “free,” I mean free from, not free to.

I mostly stayed on the couch, lying down. I only got up for the bathroom or bedtime.

It was 5:00 pm on Wednesday. Cristina, my wife, stood up to take the dogs for their evening walk. I stood up, declaring, “Well, I’m going up to the bathroom so I can not poop again.”

It sure seemed funny at the time.

As I closed the bathroom door, I heard her walking out the sliding door with the dogs downstairs.

My bathroom instructions were clear. Sit for no more than five minutes unless something happens. If something passes, then give it another 2-3 minutes to see if something else happens. By that point, I’d gotten into the habit of standing up at about the five-minute mark, dissatisfied.

A hot shower is the solution to all pain, so after five minutes of sitting, I stood up to get in the shower. Within seconds, I was hit with a powerful wave of paristalsis. That’s when the colon starts to do its job of moving former food out the back door.

Normally, it’s a relieving sensation. Not that evening. Not in the shower.

“Oh my god,” I said to nobody, realizing that I was going to pass something.

This is not the place to do that. Can’t do that. Also, it’s gonna hurt.

And hurt it did.

The pain was so great, I immediately felt like I was going to vomit or pass out, so I turned off the water and lowered myself to my knees. Then I leaned forward in a kind of child’s pose, diagonal across the square shower floor.

From there, I felt more stools pass. The colon was running the show, not the brain. I was simply a witness to this until I wasn’t.

That’s when I blacked out.

What’s been enlightening as I’ve opened up about this is how many men have reported some kind of personal hemorrhoid story. Nearly every man that I’ve talked to copped to his own experience.

Apparently, hemorrhoids happen to a lot of us. We just don’t talk about it. No man, gay or straight, wants to talk about hemorrhoids. I might be wrong, but none of my gay friends—bottoms and tops—have ever copped to hemorrhoids.

Taking it a step further, I doubt any man wants to talk (or even think) about someone performing surgery on their butthole. No thanks.

But straight men don’t want to discuss the topic of buttholes at all. Not unless it’s in irony. We certainly don’t want to talk about anything penetrating us, not physically, and definitely not emotionally.

Credit where credit is due, this idea came to me from someone I wrote about in my last essay [The Deepest Truth About a Man’s Worth], Richard Meacock. He was my high school English teacher, but also someone who took a paternal role during my early twenties.

“Straight men are petrified of being penetrated,” Richard opined one day in his very British way, adding, “physically and emotionally.”

At the time, I giggled, but I was a little offended. I was clearly an example of the exception that proves the rule. At the time, even if physical penetration was a non-starter for me—no hate, it’s just not for me—I didn’t feel afraid of emotional penetration.

If that last part was ever true, it stopped being true at some point as I aged. At fifty-one, emotional penetration feels scarier than it did when Richard said that, and I haven’t shifted on physical penetration.

No, thank you.

I also don’t like melon in my fruit salad, most country music, and blacking out, which is funny for a guy who used to get blackout drunk. I really dislike an actual blackout, something that has happened half a dozen times in my life.

When I came to in the shower, standing up as you may recall, I was confused and terrified. I also didn’t realize I was in the shower. Part of the brain noticed that I was screaming, even as another part was doing the screaming.

It was like I was observing the Damon project from two different parts of experience at the same time.

Once I woke up enough to stop swaying, I rinsed off, cleaned up the shower, and patted myself dry with a towel. As I did so, I caught my reflection in the mirror. Blood streamed down my face. I’d assumed the blood in the shower was from the surgery site.

Apparently, in my blackout stupor, I’d banged my head against one or both of the hangers mounted to the shower wall, one for my razor, and the other for a squigee.

After mopping up the blood, I finally opened the bathroom door and walked out into the cool, dry air of the upstairs corridor. That’s when I heard Cristina returning from the dog walk.

“Honey?” I whisper-yelled so as not to raise her hackles.

“Yes?” She replied from her upper octave.

“Can you come help me with something?”

“Sure!” she sang back.

The sound of her feet striding up the tiled stairs let me know she was coming.

Before she could fully ascend, I added, “Okay, but please don’t freak out.”

Cristina first glanced at my torso, looking for something worthy of a freak out. Then she saw my head and the blood.

“We agreed you wouldn’t freak out!” I asserted, which wasn’t exactly true.

Asking for help has never been a strength for me. I’m more guilty of claiming, “If you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself.” Part of me also hates that I make this claim. It’s so uncharitable, and the only people who say it are always miserable fucks.

Again, this is more of a problem for men. We could be stranded in the middle of nowhere, holding our guts in with a hubcap, failing to call for help. A la, I don’t want to worry anyone.

Asking for help is just another penetration, this one to our story of self. It illuminates that we’re not capable of handling everything that happens.

We expect that we could shove our guts back in, then stitch our abdominal wall back together, Rambo style, long enough to [maybe] pop by the ER on our way home. That’s after we roll the crashed car back onto its wheels and turn over the engine.

It’s this mentality that keeps us from talking about uncomfortable topics like hemorrhoids. It also isolates us. We each think we’re the only one, out here alone.

We do it with all our vulnerable parts, physical and emotional.

These last four seven weeks, I’ve often wondered why nobody ever taught me how to go to the bathroom. No disrespect to my mother. She taught me how to use the tools of the bathroom. That’s as much as any of us gets, because nobody taught our parents anything more, possibly less.

This is what I’ve learned recently:

1. Sitting on the toilet for more than five minutes without anything passing? Bad. Get off the toilet. Come back later.

2. After something passes, give it 2-3 minutes more. That’s it.

3. People will have gas. Sitting on the toilet isn’t the best or only solution.

This goes against our current culture of endlessly swiping before wiping, where we sit and mindlessly push from our abdominals on one of the most sensitive and important (also valuable) parts of the body.

May my device never be within arm’s reach while I’m on the toilet again, and may I be occupied and out of the bathroom quickly enough to not care.

Never again is what my doctor promised, and I intend to make good on that. This has been too high a price to pay for extended private time. If I need more alone time, I’ll get it standing in the bathroom afterward.

Or I’ll go for a walk, for crying out loud.

Later that fateful Wednesday night, a friend stopped over, one who happens to be a doctor. He checked out my cuts, my sore neck, and my general condition. Best guess, I suffered a vagus nerve event, brought on by the stress of the spontaneous and explosive bowel movement.

May you never experience such a thing, dear reader, whatever your gender.

What I fear this says for men is that we have to be forced into vulnerability. We’ll hold the line on “I’m fine” until we’re finally on the ground, literally or figuratively. And even then, we’ll be checking the mirror to see if we can hide all the evidence.

In my case, it was all over my face. My immediate intuition was to hide it from my wife. That’s assuming I could have, which I couldn’t. From this side of it, that seems ridiculous, but I was in the absolute throes of vulnerability in that moment. That, and my adrenaline was still pumping like a bee stinger.

My casual assessment is that most men would have considered the same: Hide it and act like nothing happened.

It’s hard to concede that Richard was right, at least in my case. I didn’t use to be this way, but I don’t know how to be otherwise.

The best I can do, as far as I can tell, is to keep sharing my feelings and stories. Speaking of stories, the main story I want to tell myself is that I am a man who is okay with feeling uncomfortable. If I keep it up, I may even one day be okay with feeling vulnerable.

A big part of me doesn’t think that’s possible. That’s the part of me that thinks, this is just what being a man is for many of us. There are exceptions, and I once thought I was one of them, but I’m not. This is my male humanity expressed.

So tell me, Men, what am I missing in this essay?

~Damon

Pushed into a K-12 private school at age 14, this public school punk struggled out of the gate. It was my freshman year. I was there because I’d been failing out of the previous system.

What made my new school hard was that the students there had all known each other since grade school. That, and they all came from money. I came from a broken middle-class home, where my mom worked two jobs to send me to private school.

Early on at the new school, in an effort to win the affections of my new friend, Jeff, I joined his efforts to pick on another boy. The boy was obviously gay, but closeted in the most ‘90s kinda way. We were complete assholes to him.

Days later, my English teacher, Richard, asked me to talk to him after class.

“This boy you were teasing in study hall the other day,” he said, pausing for effect as I sank deep into my seat. “Do you understand that you’re hurting him?”

This simple idea hadn’t occurred to me, which piled awful onto awful. I’d been bullied myself plenty in the public schools. The shame welled up on my cheeks like tomato soup, scarlet and steamy.

That was all it took.

In short order, I’d come to befriend the boy and, in time, become an outspoken advocate for gay rights. Richard took me under his wing, too, acting as a mentor and something like a surrogate father in later years.

Anyone who sat in one of Richard’s classes knew this about him: in life, Richard Meacock showed the fuck up, as a teacher, a mentor, a father to his daughter, and to any student who needed one of those figures in their life.

He was present. He was an embodied presence to put it more clearly. From the vantage of middle age, I now see that this was his value. It’s all of ours, really. Most of us just don’t know it.

Let’s back up a second.

For months, I’ve been wrestling with self-worth via this newsletter, and I’ve had some moments of insight that I’ve shared.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll be aware that I’ve written three essays on it, each attempting to refine its measurement.

In the first piece, What’s My Worth as Man?, I asserted that anyone who lightens the burdens of another is valuable. Nice and neat, but not satisfying.

In the follow-up, My Self-Worth Portfolio, I suggested that men would be wise to keep a diverse portfolio of self-worth investments. That seemed like a better plan.

And finally, in Self-Worth Really Isn’t About Me, I landed on the value of other people in our lives to reflect any notions we might have about our self-worth.

Each of these claims seemed a little deeper, but each was really stuck at the surface. The problem, as I see it now, is that each defined self-worth from somewhere out there.

In truth, the most valuable source of our self-worth was always right here. One could call this the tap root of our self-worth: Our human value.

This is the deeper truth as I see it now:

Value was already a quality of being for each of us, from before we existed.

Whereas all of my former claims about self-worth will ultimately rise and fall over time, our innate value will not. Presence is the big clue. It’s an idea we’ll come back to, along with what I mean by “from before we existed.”

In many ways, Richard Meacock was the embodiment of this truth, but I was not ready to see it back then. It’s probably true that one can believe this without seeing it, but it also seems true that seeing it is everything to living it.

Please, I know this is a little esoteric. Bear with me. Even if you come to disagree with me in the end, I promise to make a solid attempt at explaining this.

Lastly, before we dig in. There’s little daylight between any human and our respective hungers to define our worth. That, and our shared confusion about where to find it. Men, however, have a particular penchant for seeking it externally, and then collapsing when those sources crumble.

Arguably, I could be speaking to all genders, but I must admit that men are central to my concerns on this matter. Take that as you will.

To begin, the first thing we need to understand is that everything changes, even stuff that we call “permanent.”

Nothing is forever

For the record, the concept that satisfaction will never come from somewhere outside of experience isn’t my original thought. This is core Buddhist philosophy on happiness or satisfaction. One needn’t sign up for Buddhism to get this.

In short, anything “out there” will never make us feel happiness or satisfaction in any kind of permanent way. Most external sources of satisfaction are barely durable, fleeting at best.

It’s how the first bite of the chocolate gelato makes me wonder if I wouldn’t have actually preferred the Stracciatella. It’s the same as how the first line of cocaine was exactly the moment I started wondering about how much more satisfying the next would be.

Again, this is logic borrowed from Buddhism, but not exclusive to it: “Everything that rises will fall,” or “Everything that has the power to live will die.”

Most people get all of this intuitively. For men who view their careers or investments as their source of satisfying self-worth, they imagine that the trick to the game is daisy-chaining their efforts and sources to cover all the gaps, thereby never needing to question their worth.

This is what I was trying to do with the essay, My Self-Worth Portfolio. This method can work, but only at a certain depth of existence, and it’s not impenetrable. I would argue it’s only slightly more sophisticated than believing my career success defines my self-worth.

What’s smuggled into both ways of navigating life is that all of this action is driven by an undercurrent of doubt, surging and falling below the deck in an endlessly threatening cadence.

Just one iceberg could bring it all down. Where would worth come from then?

In the essay, Self-Worth Isn’t Really About Me, I really believed I’d stumbled into what was missing from the portfolio model. We need other people to feel a sense of completion with our self-worth investments.

This is still valuable at a certain depth. It's certainly more sophisticated than my previous claims. It brings people together, right? That’s virtuous. Right?

Yes, and yes. It does. This model of self-worth can really work, but not unfailingly. It’s still a collection of external sources of value, susceptible to the same laws that govern birth and death, and all transactional.

In a world where transactions are the only source of our human value, we’re all doomed to suffer for long periods of time, and some of us for life. There must be something deeper than this, is the thought I keep noticing, and what is it? is the question I keep asking.

The answer came to me recently in a lecture from a man named Steve March.

Value is already innately present

Unless you’re a coach or philosopher, and even then, you won’t know Steve March. He’s the founder of the Aletheia School of Coaching, a school that seeks to upend the self-improvement standard in coaching.

What Steve said in a recent training, where he was one of the facilitators, blew my mind. It also made me think of you, dear reader, and this dragon I’ve been attempting to slay.

I’m paraphrasing, but what Steve said was something like this:

“Value is already a quality of being for each of us, from before we existed.”

If you’re like me, the first thought you had was… “BULLSHIT.” But, since then, I’ve been investigating this claim through dialogue and thought experiments.

What Steve is really claiming is that we are born with value, and that this value doesn’t go away just because we made unwise choices in life or because nobody told us. Like the luminosity of light, it’s not something light does. It is what light is.

With humans, we could call this humination, our human presence in any given context. Like light, which is valuable even when it’s not present, so too is human presence. In fact, it’s arguable that both are even more valuable when they are not available.

If that metaphor doesn’t work, try this thought experiment:

Imagine being trapped alone on an island indefinitely, and how the non-presence of another human might cause a well of desire to rise so uncontrollably. Imagine finally seeing another human strolling down the beach after months of solitude. Imagine how that might feel, even before you speak to that person.

We generally take presence for granted, but this thought experiment seems to illustrate clearly how we might feel if it were gone, like the rising sun after the darkest night.

Every being, by virtue of existing, is an expression of this fundamental worth.

Don’t worry if this isn’t landing for you right now. This is me officially recommending you hold onto it for later in that case. Here’s why.

Once we see this, we may not need the other stuff

A friend recently shared something difficult he’s going through in a voice note, citing that he just needed to vent. He was struggling with a disabled person in his life. Making matters worse, the real problem was how a part of him hated the part that was struggling.

With his permission, I reflected back what I heard him saying, offering how he might reframe the situation and give himself some respite. He was really coming down hard on himself and needed an advocate.

This move, tracking (reflecting) and offering, is something I’ve picked up from coaching. I also use it when talking to people outside my practice. For my friend, it made him feel so seen; he burst into tears listening to my message. (Not my intention.)

Most would assume that my worth in that exchange was my being a coach. Not quite. My value to this friend was my humination, my human presence, the same presence I saw in Richard Meacock.

Like darkness being an ideal environment for showcasing the value of light, coaching is an ideal medium for humination, our innate human value.

Humination doesn’t trade on anything. It’s not transactional. It just is. It was valuable before we were born, and it will remain valuable after these bodies die. It cannot be taken from us, and it remains valuable even if we’re not practicing it.

Some of us practice it more skillfully than others, but all embodiments remain valuable.

When the career falls apart, when all our virtuous investments crash, and when we find ourselves without another soul to reflect our experience, we’re still valuable.

You are valuable right now for your own humination. Your very presence as you read this text sheds awareness on what I’ve written in a way that no rock, animal, or entire solar system can do. Not as far as we know.

So let me express gratitude to you for being here, for seeing me.

It’s so very meaningful to me.

~Damon

How not to love

As I whipped my car keys at Cristina, yelling at her to just go home, I was deep in a brownout somewhere between two LA beaches: Manhattan and Hermosa.

The next grainy memory was ambling South on Hermosa Avenue. I couldn’t remember why I was angry anymore, so I called someone who’d know.

“I’m angry,” I growled at Cristina.

“I know,” she whispered through tears.

“Why… am I angry?!” I demanded, as if she owed me an explanation.

Me writing this: sigh

To call this a “regrettable drunken moment” doesn’t begin to capture it. Everything about it reeks of sour mash, tobacco, and urine, all leeching out of the drunken man-boy I used to be.

Clearly, at least by this account, I’m nobody’s expert on relationshipping. And yet this is where I most often find myself in dialogue with other men, beyond the search for self-worth, talking about Connection.

Fitting, by the way. This is where we ended the last essay, the third in a series on men defining their self-worth.

Romantic or otherwise, connection is the necessary point of completion in all our self-worth endeavors, even our solo retreats. It’s what brings it all home. For many men, the greatest of these connections is the one they commit to for something like forever.

We could call this a prime connection.

This desire for it maddens and confounds us. We struggle to know what it is we truly want, and yet that doesn’t stop us from pursuing it.

In some lucky cases, its consummation—in whatever form we define that—is what finally tames all our wild horses.

It’s no wonder we wanna talk about it, even when we think we don’t, even when we feel like we’re suffocating in solitude over it. It rises up like a sickness.

That sickness drives us to want the fantasy before we truly know what we’re in for, perhaps before we’ve even felt the full force of the bug. Perhaps this is all necessary to really know connection.

Is unhealthy connection necessary?

There are the connections we wish we had, the ones we’re trying to hold onto, and the ones we seem to be losing. In my case, when the car keys went flying, I was unknowingly leaning into the last category.

If you’d asked me earlier that day, before the drinking began, I would have sworn I was in none of them. We were good. Looking back, it’s so obvious to me from my fifties that we were two young adults living in their second round of teen angst, getting by on fortune, mutual lust, and charm.

It’s not that we didn’t invest time in trying to give our relationship depth. We just hadn’t been through the necessary trials to know what we were capable of together.

What we had was a relationship neither of us would tolerate today. At that age, unhealthy was easier, less confrontational. We also hadn’t earned something deeper yet. I think this is true for most young lovers.

Back then, we didn’t know what it meant to struggle together. Cristina was my best drinking buddy. We both loved the ocean. We had matching tattoos for god’s sake.

Obviously, we survived the flying keys event. Years later, we married. Not even two years after that, we moved to Costa Rica and really tested our mettle.

There, we faced the grift of most everything we’d saved, robbed by an early business partner. We lived several years in a state of poverty, but also made good friends. I sobered up, we watched countless sunsets flash green light as they dropped into the Pacific Ocean, and enjoyed many tropical weekend getaways. (Not bad for poverty, I know, but we were also racking up some nasty debt. That’s another essay.)

We even figured out how to run the pizzeria we’d bought. Overall, we built a mutual resilience to many unexpected challenges.

By the time we left Costa Rica, we were no longer in an unhealthy relationship. By hook, crook, and great fortune, we’d discovered what stuff we were made of. The key point is that we did all of this together.

Suffice it to say, it was so much harder to build a healthy connection.

None of this makes me a relationship expert

What I am… is an expert on this one relationship. I don’t have a meta-view of it. Otherwise, I’d write a step-by-step guide, publish, and get rich from the waterfall of royalties. (Yes, I’m aware this isn’t exactly how books work anymore.)

What I do have expertise in is listening and reflecting, something I’ve been doing since I was a teenager, but also in leadership roles, and more recently as a coach. This is how I end up in these conversations. I’m not mad about it either. These types of conversations energize me.

Ironically, repetitive dialogue on this subject is building a certain kind of competency in me on relationships, at least in terms of what’s not helpful. A friend of mine pointed out that the usual advice from guys like me is something like, “Hey, man. Just let it go. Work on yourself. It’ll come.”

Guilty as charged. I was one of the guys who said that to him.

The problem with this advice is that the single man feels the darkness of undesired solitude, the sting of unrequited love, and the emptiness of loveless sex. For the hopeful father, he feels opportunity slipping with every lap around the sun.

It’s so easy for me to say, “Chill. It’ll happen, man.” It’s also not helpful. One doesn’t feel seen when someone like me says shit like that.

The harsher truth is that connections of this sort aren’t easy. Like finding the right camping spot, it can take a lot of driving down the wrong road to either give up or start over. It takes loss, strife, and mettle-forging, and even then?

Nothing’s guaranteed.

For every couple that stood together against slings and arrows, many surrendered to the next battle, or the next, or the one after that.

What’s the hope in that promise? What does it sound like?

“Hey, man. I know it’s hard, but it’s gonna be harder to make something work, and it may get even harder after that. Nothing’s guaranteed, but have fun trying!”

It’s a wonder any of us even bothers.

Where does this all go?

Just today—hours ago, as I write this—the news came through that the man of a couple we know just passed away after five years of dementia. His wife is young enough to find love again, if she’s interested.

First, there is the necessary grief.

After over fifty years of marriage and a long, painful decline, it’s easy to imagine that one’s motivation to set up a Tinder profile would be low. Who wants to go back to crying over thrown keys?

And yet, a couple who have spent that much time together understand tested mettle at a level most humans will never know. This isn’t fair, but it’s true.

This was a couple that faced not just the ugliness of their mutual pasts, but also the tough lessons of the world around them, and the new uglinesses they created along the way. And there are definitely new uglinesses that we create as we go.

This is not me being presumptuous. Before he fell into dementia, the man shared some of this with me. It’s the tough part of forever that young couples fantasize about, but never really consider.

At age fifty, after a year of surgeries and doctor visits dedicated to the parts of the body that start failing at this age, I know something of this already. (At least it gets worse, right?)

Cristina and I may only be partway at this point, but I’m confident it’s all worth it. I know because I see what it’s like to live in the wake of love lost, or to live with unrequited love. I saw it when my parents’ marriage collapsed, and I see variations of this with the men I know.

It may be true that it’s better to have loved and lost, but it’s also true that it’s simply better to have love now, that is, if we ever truly “have” anything.

Can’t I just have good friends?

The short answer is, of course. More power to you.

As is clear now, it’s hard to be in love, and it’s hard to be alone, but it’s not just a matter of picking your hard. At least for those seeking that prime connection, good friends will always miss the mark.

Intimate relationships are a special connection where self-worth resonates in harmonies unheard in other connections. That said, a cadre of good friends can do a lot. They can be the mahogany soundboard that reverberates all our discovered meaningfulness, reflecting back what we bring to those relationships, the lessons we’ve collected from our own lives.

For men seeking intimacy, however, there will always be some overtones lost.

For these men, more friends may only serve as more reminders of what is missing in their lives, like certain tones from a chord.

This is just my perspective

It shouldn’t shock anyone that a Substack essay is just my experience. For me, it’s important I don’t preach or advise, even though I know I do anyway from time to time.

Sorry about that.

A few years ago, Cristina also stopped drinking. Whether she’s an alcoholic or one who failed to launch, we may never know. We both come from alcoholic families, but that’s not saying much. Many people do. We are the end of the line for our family trees, both genetically and alcoholically.

The greatest outcome of this is that we’ve only grown closer since. When I first stopped drinking, I read that couples like us wouldn’t last. I was so committed to my sobriety, I had to ignore that shit. My commitment to myself, the line in the sand I drew was, even if the planet-killing asteroid is en route, I won’t drink.

I share this not as a means to claim moral high ground. I have no idea why I could want to stop drinking and stick to it when many others have failed. I have no way of knowing why Cristina was able to do the same.

What we have, which I think is a sloppy way to articulate it, is something we’ll never be able to understand. It showed up yesterday at the beach, playing beach volleyball together. Most couples can’t do this because they end up fighting.

There are no keys thrown between Cristina and me anymore. We may butt heads, but we talk about it later, calmly, and not on the sand or the street.

Here’s what I know, at least for me. The car keys event was necessary in its own little way. So was every bickering match, even the ones I was too drunk to remember. You can also add the loss of our savings in Costa Rica, the end of our party life, and the shared loss of people that we’ve known who’ve died.

It’s all been grist for the prime connection mill. It’s the same one that turns out to be the most valuable resource of reflection in both our lives. I get why someone would want this. It’s the good stuff.

We also know one more thing. It could all end before we watch another green flash sunset. It’s so trite to scream about the importance of now, but ideas are trite for a reason.

Thanks for being here.

~Damon

This essay is part of an unplanned trilogy. My hope is that each stands on its own, but if you’d like to start at the beginning, check out these two first:

1. What’s My Worth as a Man

2. My Self-Worth Portfolio

Meaning and others

When invited me to speak with him on a Substack LIVE event about success, it was in reference to an essay he’d written in response to an essay I’d written.

A realization hit me mid-conversation.

None of what we do matters in a vacuum, especially our investments in self-worth.

Ever since then, I keep wondering to myself and asking others if this is true.

It’s other people who make any investment worth pursuing. It’s the ways our invested resources are reflected back to us through the experience of others that make our efforts truly gratifying.

This is where success alone can fail to deliver. It needs an exchange, like creating jobs, connecting people, mentoring others to do the same, charity, or some such pathway to connection and reflection with others.

Referring to my last essay on self-worth as a diversified investment strategy, when we see how our investments positively impact the lives of others, that’s an undeniable source of self-worth. It’s what can give any investment of money, attention, or energy… meaning.

Determining self-worth is about defining meaningfulness for ourselves as individuals, and I believe it always includes others, even when it doesn’t seem to.

This further illustrates the difficulty of isolation, and in the interests of this Substack, the isolation felt by men. It’s a problem not only of one’s community or lack thereof, but also the meaningfulness of how our communities reflect the investments we make.

The lonely man problem

This comes into focus when we consider men’s isolation. Folks call it the loneliness epidemic. This freighted term attempts to capture a concern that we can all share. It’s about isolation, but it’s more complicated than that. Isolation is often just one log on this pyre.

This incendiary circumstance is not just a problem for men, because men live in the world we all share. These men might live in solitude, but they often act out in the presence of others. Similar to how femicide and sexual abuse of women is a us problem, men’s isolation is a problem for all of us, like it or not.

In both cases, the victims suffer in an intolerable solitude, and when there is rupture, the emotional shrapnel can affect everyone around them. What’s even crazier is the Venn crossover between the two.

When the match is inevitably lit, because life can be trigger-y, isolated men are more likely to act out violently, not just toward themselves, but toward partners and others.

Research conducted by Boston College and Georgetown University illustrates this by what COVID taught us about isolation and its effect on intimate partner violence (IPV):

Loneliness is not only acutely painful in its own right; it also inflicts a range of long lasting health-related harms, and can heighten survivors’ vulnerability to coercive control and intimate partner violence (IPV), creating a vicious cycle that may continue long after the cessation of COVID-related policies.

Peek under the hood of this research only if you feel brave. Suffice it to say, we can’t simply sit back and let anyone suffer in isolation like it’s their problem, certainly not men. And wagging our fingers is pointless.

The even harder detail to parse is that not all time alone is bad for men.

The Hero’s Journey

A friend recently took a very solo, life-affirming, and meaningful journey on a motorcycle through the northernmost parts of Scotland. There was nobody there to share this with him, and in many ways, that’s what made it so meaningful for him.

Lest I betray his trust by telling too much of his story, let me share my own. In 2018, only months into our time in Mexico, I told my wife that I would be going on a ten-day silent retreat. She declined to raise her hand and join me. That was fine. I was determined to go.

She would later share with me that leading up to it, she felt a mixture of feelings. She was concerned for my safety, and for her own loneliness, but also impressed with my bravery. Her word, not mine. I didn’t see my actions as brave. I saw them as necessary.

Before I’d left on this journey, I’d already caused a ripple in the life of someone else. This would come back to me after the retreat, which was strangely isolating. It’s ten days of silence. There are other people, but one is asked not to make eye contact, even. It’s a shared act of solitude, at least until day ten, when one finally meets the person that they’ve been bunking with.

All the while I was away, Cristina kept a journal of her days to hold me close. And when I finally returned home, I’d like to think I unfolded something about this person I seem to be. I may have left as a personal mission in development, but the value of that was the ways in which I would relate to my wife, my friends, and my family… anyone, really.

There is an arc of meaning that is completed when it’s shared with others, even when the labor of the journey is shouldered by one. It’s in that resonance that the arc feels most punctuated.

It’s hard to imagine it meaning so much in an empty world, and if that’s not compelling enough, consider that isolation is the most time-honored form of torture for the imprisoned. People die in solitary confinement. Outside the Buddhas of the world—those who’ve trained and tested the limits of solitude—the rest of us tend to find isolation maddening.

It’s not just the presence of others

The historic Buddha, born a prince, left his very privileged and comfy home to sit alone in a cave for an indefinite amount of time. He stayed there for something like seven years, nearly dying in the process, but eventually achieving enlightenment for his efforts.

Talk about a solo journey, giving life a little meaning. When I left my career of ten years in the fitness industry, I wish I could report that it was in search of enlightenment or even meaning.

I just wanted to spend more time partying. So I did. For seven months in Costa Rica, I partied until I realized that any meaning my life had was back in my former career.

Unwilling to go backward, I sobered up, found a support group, and started writing. That led to writing SEO content and eventually marketing emails.

But the work felt empty, and writing as an income had stripped the meaning from what writing provided. After a slog through purpose discovery work, a career in coaching called me to step up.

What gives my life meaning is connecting deeply with individuals so that we can solve problems together, or at least that was how I originally wrote my purpose statement.

Connecting. With individuals. Together.

It’s no wonder I see this puzzle this way.

Unfolding meaning through this

What I now think I stumbled onto in that conversation with Taylor, what my friend’s story of a motorcycle journey and my retreat further illuminated, is that meaning is both the unfoldment of our unseen parts and the ways we share them with the people in our lives.

There is no one without the other, but the cycle of meaning is completed when the part that seems like a “me” connects with the parts that seem to be a “them,” when we all break bread and share tales of what’s transpired.

It’s not the accomplishments of a successful friend in and of themselves, but the sharing of those accomplishments with others. It’s the battles won, the allegiances forged, and what has come of it all. It’s the communion felt in a community we’ve come back to after a hard solo journey in solitude.

This is how the feeling of meaningfulness unfolds alongside our own process of unfoldment, and that of other people as they witness it.

The invitation is for us to partake in both. Go out and do scary shit, then come back to share it with others, inspire, and celebrate. Tell stories of what you find. Share what you notice. Ask others what they think.

To the extent that meaningfulness can find a durability, this is the way.

Thanks for being here,

~Damon

Tolomen

Men need a space where they can feel normal and seen with other men.

The therapy-free men’s group I facilitate is still looking for other men who are skeptical about men’s groups. We have room for at least two more men.

It’s $30 a month. Please DM me if you or someone you know could benefit.

This essay is part of an unplanned trilogy. My hope is that each stands on its own, but if you’d like to start at the beginning, check out the first essay:

1. What’s My Worth as a Man

The failings of success

As my friend Codin described his role with the company he worked for, and the team that reported to him, the lights of Manhattan skyscrapers winked in the background. They could see me shrinking a little.

“Congratulations on all your success,” I said. “What an interesting swap our lives have made.”

“How do you mean?” Codin asked.

“It’s been almost a decade since I left my very successful career in the fitness industry, and I have yet to be successful again.”

“There are many ways to think about success, Damon. You’re happily married, living an enviable life abroad.”

Six years later, I’m still grappling with his poignant observation. Success is measurable in many ways, but I suspect metrics are not the way. Further complicating matters, the moment we ascribe metrics to self-worth, we set ourselves up for disappointment. Metrics always move in the wrong direction eventually.

The hard aspect to see in all of this isn’t the metrics themselves or how they move. It’s the stories we tell ourselves, and how we attach our sense of self to those stories.

Similar to how headlines can seduce investors, our stories can inflate and deflate our perception of self-worth in unrealistic but believable ways.

These perceptions are based on stories that are not empirically true, but still worthy of consideration.

Potential investments

If the value of self is quantifiable, then we’d be wise to keep a diverse portfolio of self-worth investments. A few categories come to mind.

1. Relationships

2. Embodied Integrity

3. Community Systems

4. Inner Work

What’s interesting about these is how the presence of other people amplifies each one. None of these is as valuable without the presence of others.

As such, Relationships are a good place to start.

As I’ve mentioned, my role as a good spouse ranks high for me when thinking about my worth. If we had children, they would be another reflection of that worth. We could also include friends and one’s community in this category. There’s a rich opportunity to discover worth from just this one investment.

It’s less about the quantity of connections, although that can matter somewhat, and more about the quality of those connections. For me, it’s about what they are getting out of time spent with me that gives this investment more weight.

Embodied Integrity is a weird one. This is what I mean by that.

In short, it’s this human experience of a body. One’s health practice usually makes the top of the list. Strength and grit probably make the list, too.

As a measure of self-worth, for me, it’s how I manage my health and how those choices positively impact others. At fifty, I can run circles around most 25-year-olds. That’s not pride. It’s just what’s true about the way I seem to be wired, which has more to do with the circumstances of my birth. If anything, I’m grateful.

Community Systems isn’t a repeat of relationships. It’s about the feeder system to our connections. It’s also where we serve, mentor, and find belonging.

It’s obvious at this point: Other people matter as reflections of our worth. What we bring to others is the fuel for what we can feel reflected from those very people. No people? No reflection.

We need a source. It could be a religious community. For me, it’s the local beach volleyball community my wife and I have built. It’s my men’s group, Tolomen, and the local Taco BrosDay meetup.

This one can be tougher for many of us. After childhood, many of us struggle to make and keep friends. Building communities isn’t for everyone. Joining them can be equally nerve-wracking. It’s tough, sure, but cultivating one’s community is just as important as it is tough.

As tough as community systems are, Inner Work may be even harder. I’m not just talking about meditation, prayer, and breath work. I mean the space where we discover meaning and purpose. I don’t mean to shock you, but meaning and purpose are always about other people.

A quick note about trauma: For folks dragging more serious forms of trauma into adulthood, inner work without assistance can be a non-starter. Going in? It can mean pain for those of us in this category. If the challenge of building a community system feels like asking someone to the prom, Inner Work can feel like volunteering to burn from the inside out for those who struggle.

Once, I invited a client who was struggling with anxiety to shift her attention below the neck. Even the thought of moving her attention to her body felt like white-hot fire. She couldn’t even fathom it. There was simply too much pain associated with her body, and I wasn’t able to help her navigate that challenge.

The right coach or, more likely, the right therapist can be useful for such situations.

My purpose is to connect deeply with individuals so that we can solve problems together. This is what came of years of meditation, tons of reflection, and some hard work in purpose discovery.

There are more categories than I’ve listed, I’m sure. These are just the investments where I’m noticing my highest returns. Despite that truth, I still notice a kind of story-forming subroutine running in the background.

Many of these stories can be addressed through Inner Work, but I’m skeptical that anyone lives above their stories all the time.

Even the historic Buddha had intrusive thoughts.

The stories we tell

Narratives get a bad rap these days, like we’re doing something wrong when creating a narrative. I would argue it’s all narrative. Everything that matters to us does so because of the story it tells us about who we are and how we fit into the world.

There are many ways narratives can become problematic, but the one that relates to self-worth is what the Buddhists call attachment. For Buddhists, any form of attachment is unwise. This is so because everything that has the power to rise will also die, including the stories we tell ourselves.

As I keep claiming, self is one of these stories.

It’s one we’re telling ourselves, one we’re constantly editing. Like any story, how we tell that story matters. So does the way in which we hold it. Hold to it lightly, and the story can seem unimportant. Hold too tightly, and changes can feel like death.

Change, the Buddhists will remind us, is as certain as taxes.

Two examples, both around embodied integrity, starting first with how we hold stories, and then how we tell the story. These share so much territory, they are nearly the same concept.

How we hold narratives

This past weekend, a friend lobbied over pancakes that bodyweight scales are worthless and should not be used. I’ve heard this argument before from another woman. I hypothesize that for women in the West, the scale is a figurative and literal arbiter of worth, albeit in reverse. Lower number = higher worth.

There is too much attachment to that number as “self,” and the daily reminder that all one’s efforts are not producing the desired results is a reminder of diminishing self-worth, plus an ongoing failure to improve it

Men tend to see that scale as data, like a bank balance. It’s not representative of all the moving parts in the background. One would be unwise to spend all that money without considering the full scope of pending transactions. Ironically, for men, the bank balance has a commensurate attachment to self.

How we tell stories

For me, there are two stories I can tell myself right now. In one, I’m nearly 51 years old, and falling apart. In the other, I’m a fighter, battling for my freedom.

A year ago, one of my cervical discs collapsed. I lost a lot of strength and, for a time, independence. Through it all, I kept my movement practice. With surgery, perseverance, and time, I regained much of what I lost, physically.

But my movement practice is more principally about the brain for me.

My North Star in the gym is brain chemistry. My movement practice keeps the darkness away. It makes me a more valuable resource to the people in my life.

If my story is only about the performance of this body, then I am losing self-worth. If it’s a story about how I show up in the relationships that matter the most to me, and how I model a wise path to those who know me and care, then my self-worth has just gone up.

Sometimes winning looks like battling. Sometimes, battling feels like losing. That feeling can make it hard to soldier on. It can feel like a kick in the stones of our self-worth.

This is where it can be so useful to have a friend—or a therapist or a coach—who can listen and reflect back what they see happening. Pulling just a little equity from our Relationships investment, it can be skillful to get that outside-in perspective.

There may be another way to look at this.

Unlike financial investments, we can revise the stories about our self-worth portfolio. We can tell the story in a way that’s more accurate about what’s true.

The Invitation

From my friend Codin’s perspective, I was missing the forest for the trees of my own success story. Consequently, I was failing to see my own self-worth story, too.

My wife and I had unshackled ourselves from the golden handcuffs of our cushy careers. We’d liberated ourselves into the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Caribbean beaches of Mexico.

Most critically, we were something valuable to each other.

To someone still in the hustle, that could all look so exhilarating, if not terrifying. What it wouldn’t look like is a failure of success or self-worth.

What I invite you to consider, dear reader, is also what I’m inviting myself to do by writing this essay.

It’s not that we abandon success metrics entirely as a source for self-worth, but that we always remember that it’s all a story. We can rewrite those stories in a way that financial portfolios can’t be rewritten.

We can remind ourselves, or with the help of someone else, of all the ways we’re positively impacting others. We can rewrite the story we’re telling ourselves.

Thanks for reading.

~Damon

Hey, man.

The men’s group I facilitate, Tolomen, has room for more men. We’re mostly deep thinkers, but we do plenty of laughing along the way. It’s a therapy-free men’s group for men suspicious of men’s groups. And it’s damn cheap at $30/month.

If you didn’t catch the essay that inspired this one, I invite you to read that as well. It’s okay that you’re reading them out of order.

Conversations of worth

Recently, I’ve had two conversations with other men that have me thinking about how men measure our worth, and how it’s inextricably tied to our success. These conversations have made me wonder about the wisdom of measuring self-worth by just one aspect of our lives, whatever that aspect may be.

TL;DR - Our worth as men is greater than our success at any point in our lives.

One conversation in particular solidified my decision to write this essay. A good friend of mine is trudging through familiar mud, struggling to be successful in his chosen career. It’s undermining him at every turn, in ways I won’t share here, lest I betray his confidence. Suffice it to say that teary-eyed dialogue cinched it for me.

We have to talk about this, which means I have to write about it.

Last week in the men’s group I host, one of the guys asked me how I was doing. This question is either the easiest or hardest question in the world. Nobody will convince me otherwise.

I decided to take the hard path.

“You know,” I replied, “I’m generally good, but I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that I’ve been experiencing something like depression for a little more than a year.”

The first two guys on the call were a little shocked by my frankness. One said something to the effect of, “That doesn’t sound good.”

He was right. It sounded concerning.

What made matters worse is that everything I said afterward seemed like I was covering something up. As the other guys showed up to the call, I caught them up. Explaining myself, something I recently advised against in another Substack essay, had even me wondering if I wasn’t, in fact, covering something up.

I wasn’t, but like being accused of culpability, almost anything one says sounds like the song of a guilty person. I lobbied anyway.

“Guys, I’m fine, really. What I’m sure is true is that my three-decade-long practice of daily exercise and my twelve years of meditation are what’s managing the experience.”

In other words, I’m not depressed in any traditional way. I assured them I’m not stuck on the couch, and I’m not suicidal. I’d simply noticed there is a darkness. In fact, a proper therapist might argue my claim. If I’m not feeling hopelessly numb, is it really depression?

I don’t know. In some ways, I’m grateful to be ignorant of the facts because I don’t need to know.

The conversation dovetailed into an episode of Dissecting Damon™, which was all coming from a very real and loving place. These guys care about me. They won’t let me slide with “Hey, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

But I am fine. I’m just not feeling the full scope of my worth. I’m not feeling particularly successful financially.

This all raises a larger question: Is success really the best metric for a man’s worth?

Is success the best metric for a man’s worth?

To imagine a man’s worth is only measurable by success is like a woman measuring her worth by her attractiveness. Both remind me of poor investment strategies. In investments, one must diversify to weather all storms. So say the experts. Surely this could apply to self-worth.

Scott Galloway, educator and podcaster, a man who’s savvy about economics and opinionated about men, alludes to success in his definition of masculinity. For him, men are providers, procreators, and protectors.

Yeah, maybe. I tell (lie to) myself that I’m more partial to what Charles Dickens says about self-worth.

At the risk of sounding crass, that knocks procreation right off the list. (Sorry, Scott) Making babies isn’t lightening anyone’s load, quite literally for the mother.

One could articulate Dickens more succinctly as…

One’s worth is more about what we are to others, measured by our humanity, not our financial success.

Even if Dickens was only thinking of dudes when he wrote that—prolly—I take him to mean each human’s worth. We men, however, reduce all that lightning of burdens into money. This is a man’s true measure of worth. It’s not success at sports, woodworking, or poker, not unless those endeavors lead to money.

Our portfolio, formal or otherwise, is a man’s mirror-mirror on the wall.

Men in places like Canada and the USA might speak of other virtues when pressed about their self-worth, like how being a good spouse or dad does the trick. Maybe, but when push comes to shove, success is underpinning this enlightened perspective. It’s easier to take the virtuous high ground when the story we’re telling ourselves about our success sounds like describing granite.

This is problematic, especially if that story cracks.

To frame this up, it’s worth mentioning that I’m an American living in Mexico. Here, the national average for monthly salary in 2025 is $1,500, and that’s the average. Some are living on much less. For most of the American and Canadian men hanging their self-worth on other virtues, I imagine they’d feel a lot differently if circumstances changed. I’m thinking of a hypothetical, like if they were physically broken and destitute from something like an accident.

It’s easy to define one’s self-worth by being a good dad or a good spouse when one is not sweating the next meal or paying the mortgage. Imagine trying to feel that way on $1,500 a month.

Ironically, the men of Mexico are more likely to derive their feeling of self-worth from being part of a loving family. Never mind how wealthy they are. I don’t know if this makes them better people. That’s not my point. It’s just an interesting comment on self-worth.

Lest I sound like the typical, bitter expat, slinging arrows back at his countrymen, let’s go back to where we started: me, my self-worth, and my own messiness.

Men are mostly alone in this

What I’m feeling is 100% related to the story I tell myself about success. The story starts to sound like some shitty ballad when I let it out. It goes like this.

I used to make a lot more money. It’s been a minute since that was the case.

The last two years have been tough building a coaching practice. Making matters worse, I started this new venture on the heels of a decade of trying to succeed as a copywriter.

In the long run, marketing wasn’t a good fit for me. But the coaching biz? It’s just hard. That’s even true for coaches who come into coaching straight from a pre-existing and vibrant professional network.

My professional network was not that. Adding to that, I live abroad.

These are my excuses. They’re the refrain I sing to myself about where I stand, teetering on the canyon’s edge of depression, holding success in one hand, and self-worth in the other.

The verses of the ballad tell a story about the world not being set up for me, but none of it’s true, not really.

The bridge argues that what’s actually true is I simply haven’t cracked the code yet. Or I have, but I haven’t seen it mature. Businesses take time to build. So said everyone who tried to build one, including the larger majority, most of whom failed.

It’s gotta be a ballad. The blues and country always end with the rising sun.

Here’s the thing. I’m not alone, certainly amongst coaches, but also amongst men (and women too). The data backs me up.

The data on this is not clear, but telling

In 2024, PubMed research spanning data from 1970 to 2020, found that any one of us can suffer in the absence of a j-o-b.

The analysis reveals a significant positive association between unemployment and mental disorders, particularly anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. Moreover, distinct patterns emerge, linking unemployment to higher rates of drug use and eating disorders in specific demographics.

It appears women also relate to the self-worth connected to their success paradigm, but this isn’t exactly the finding. This data is more about how unemployment increases the potential for other negative patterns. It doesn’t directly claim why this happens.

In any case, I still view this as a human experience, especially in a Western world. In the West, we’re very attached to our vehicles and homes, but we introduce ourselves by our careers.

Hi, I’m Damon. I’m a coach for men. I may actually be a leadership coach for men, but I’m still ironing that out. (Insert: hearty laugh)

From this little bit, people can assume much about my heart, my mind, and my politics. And since I’m a man, they may also feel they know my worth, especially if they can smell anything about my status from the way I present myself.

Women, it seems, enjoy just as much, if not more confidence (a reflection of self-worth) from their careers as men do. The research on this is old; it’s apparently a closed case.

From a 1997 PubMed abstract:

Self-esteem was higher among women in highly autonomous jobs, and nonmarried women had higher self-esteem than others. The strongest effect on self-esteem was that of feeling competent as a worker.

The other compelling research I found was nearly as old as I, and it basically made the same points. Like I said, it’s a closed matter. We’ve known for a while that women also take value from their work. (Duh!)

The distinction for men is that we struggle to imagine another path to our self-worth. The obvious example is that we can’t get pregnant, not yet anyway.

We’re also confused about discovering worth through other means. That’s most of us, at least, or many of us. I can’t tell. As with any rule, there’s an exception that proves it (or so they say).

A man is reading this (thank you, sir) who believes I’m writing so much bullshit. Turning to Reddit as I plunked out this essay, I found a number of these men commenting that they do not attach their worth to the typical indicator of success, their careers.

A few mentioned what should be obvious validations of worth, like:

• Being a dad (actively involved with the kids)

• Volunteering

• Mentoring

Confession: As I read these men’s accounts of their experience, part of me raised an eyebrow. Contrarians love Reddit. So do trolls.

Apparently, some men could lose their jobs, be out of work for prolonged periods of time, slowly draining resources, and they would not start to wonder if they’re worth anything.

I’m sure this is true. They’re dads, right? Again, maybe.

This all brings me back to Dickens, and to where I’m trying to invest in my own self-worth portfolio.

Are we really valuable by other means?

As a coach, I strongly value seeing others as they wish to feel seen. So, I see you, you ardent defender of other sources of self-worth. If you’re really out there, I believe we need your voice.

We need more voices like Charles Dickens lobbying for the simple and powerful value of lightening the burdens of another.

This philosophy of Dickens could also apply to those of us who prefer to define our sense of self-worth through success. I see you too. Your way is fine in my book, with one tiny invitation: that you put that powerful resource to use for the greater good. It’s nothing to do with virtue or stature, but about the stories we tell ourselves.

In truth, I hope to soon (and again) count myself amongst the men who feel successful. Far greater than the reward of living a luxurious life—something I already do if you ask our gardener, house cleaner, or pool cleaner—the ability to lighten the burdens of another with money I earned would be so rewarding.

I can’t deny that this piece added to my portfolio of self-worth would increase its valuation beyond measure. Until then, these are the categories where I’m investing.

Spouse. My commitment to my wife and being the best spouse I can be, supporting and loving her to the best of my ability, takes precedence.

As partners, we’ve taken on a challenging life by living abroad. It requires ongoing dialogue about what is and isn’t working. We speak almost daily on such matters. On Sundays, we share a moment stolen from Tim Ferriss (author, podcaster), where we each share:

1. What makes me feel gratitude toward you

2. What makes me feel gratitude toward myself (much harder)

3. What I want us to have more of

Wellness. My lifestyle is critical. I keep a daily wellness practice of movement and meditation.

As I mentioned in the story above, without these, I would be on medication and potentially facing depression. Firmly in place, these allow me to be the best me for my clients, family, and friends.

Leader. I will continue to pull men together in groups so that men can learn to be more tolerant of other men, themselves, and their discomforts.

These are my most powerful investments for now. When I’m operating from wisdom, these are the ways I define my sense of self-worth, even as I suspect there is more that is possible. This is good enough, and it is far from useless.

Thanks for reading.

~Damon

So what about you? How are you investing in your own self-worth these days?

This was the first of three essays on self-worth. Read the follow-up essay next.

Read it!