The prison of a man’s mind

Not only in today’s society, but throughout all time men have been expected to hold in all of their feelings and bottle them up before sharing them with anyone else. I am going to refer to this issue from a man’s perspective throughout this blog post because that is the one I live, however this issue affects many people other than just men. If you were to ask a room full of men if they have ever been told to “be a man” or to “toughen up”, most of them in that room would answer yes with no hesitation. This is the mentality that most men these days are forced to have based on societal norms. Not only is this detrimental and exhausting for a man’s mental health but it will also negatively impact any relationship that they would be a part of. If men continue to feel that they can not share, especially with, let’s say, their partner, then that relationship will not last.

During this semester, I have been struggling with some heavy things constantly on my mind within my own personal  life. I am very fortunate to have a wonderful supportive group around me that encourages me to be able to speak out about what I am going through. This does not always mean that I do though. Myself, along with many men, feel ashamed about our feelings or end up hiding it because we do not want to be seen as weak. We end up pushing these feelings to the side or hiding them in the back of our mind to where we just try to forget about it and end up leaving it to be handled another time. 

Hiding feelings could be a result of plenty of different things, but I know personally that when I have done it, if it was not for the reasons described above, it was out of a fear of rejection. Whether that meant I wanted to go talk to a girl and was scared that showing my emotions would make her not interested in me. This could also mean that I wouldn’t show emotions in my relationships now as a fear of making my partner less interested in me for being too needy or vulnerable. Hiding these feelings can lead to a plethora of problems in a man’s life, the biggest one for me personally recently has been my mental health struggle. I have always felt that I needed to be able to handle things or take care of things by myself in order to not ruin my image as a man. 

These feelings of privacy and shame of our emotions are not only internal, many men are often ridiculed by someone else that has made them feel this way. For me, I was in a bad relationship and when I tried to open up to them about things that I was dealing with, I would get laughed at,  told that they didn’t care or that my problems did not matter as much as theirs. This is the case for a lot of guys. There is a lack of trust and safe spaces for men when it comes to talking about their emotions and feelings. Many women are more comfortable with their friends in having deeper conversations about topics. Men have a tougher time going to their friends about their struggles, which leads to a lot of repressed feelings in order to save themselves from confronting it with other people. The “role” of a man is to provide, and protect, these feelings or emotions could lead to them not feeling or appearing as strong as they feel they should be or need to be.