How to be vulnerable like a bro
Today I decided to stop twiddling my thumbs about all this and just write.
Instead of spending the next days, weeks, and months (which I’ve been doing) trying to figure out my positioning exactly right, I’m just going to write. Because at the end of the day I do really want to write. And I’ve been putting that off because I want what I write to be “perfect.”
I want my blog posts to be perfect. I want them to be perfectly valuable for anyone who finds them. I want them to be the best blog posts on the topic, and to become a respected thought leader on the topics of emotional awareness and vulnerability for men.
But the truth is, all that is just getting in the way of me writing.
The way I like to write is to just start and go. I don’t really think too much. I let what comes up come up. This is what feels good. Whether it makes for good reading, I don’t know. But it’s raw. And that’s what I have to offer: an unfiltered, non-glamorous look at my inner world.
There’s so much material online about “becoming a better man.” Whether that means becoming more “alpha” or becoming better with women or becoming the most confident version of yourself, I’ve come to think a lot of it is just a load of bull.
Maybe it actually is bull and maybe it’s not. A lot of guys don’t know the difference. They don’t know the difference because all they ever do is ignore how they really feel about anything. It’s all about showing off, looking good, getting other people’s approval.
Sometimes I’ll be sitting at a table with a few other guys and the bravado is too much for me. Maybe I’m just a softie, but I get the feeling no one’s really being honest — with each other or with themselves.
Once I went to a workshop — it was a sort of group therapy retreat for men. There were about 30 of us. The first thing we had to do was, one-by-one, go to the front of the room and tell a vulnerable story about ourselves.
What happened?
A handful of guys actually opened up and shared something that took real courage to share.
But the vast majority of guys took it as an opportunity — and it’s an open question as to why — to show off.
It seemed to me that for a lot of these guys, being “vulnerable” just meant telling a funny, embarrassing story about themselves.
It turned into a bit of a circle-jerk in my opinion. Everyone was just trying to make everyone else laugh. “Look at me. Look at how stupid I was. Wasn’t I ridiculous? Ha ha ha.”
Is that really vulnerability?
I can see how it can appear to be so. So maybe it’s faux-vulnerability.
But it’s a far cry from actually opening up and sharing your inner world with someone.