how often? seldom-ish lately. though it comes and goes. i feel that i have been in more of a emotional support provider role of late, due to some stuff going on with a friend and some other family stuff.... but nobody seems to be doing well. it's disgusting to me personally how much emphasis is placed on professional/economic productivity as some kind of index for fulfillment. like, if you keep your head down, do your job, pay your bills, and save for a rainy day.... that's all there is to it. edification, self-understanding/mastery, non-monetized hobbies feel regarded as eccentricity/elective. when i saw that headline about how everybody in america has depression now, i was like, "no shit."
i have to echo the fear of sharing complex emotions with others, in general, is that the others will express disinterest or otherwise act in a way to discourage it... and how that fear is routinely validated by the way others have been socialized to react to men looking for emotional support. aside from close family, my better experiences in being vulnerable are with other men. not all of them, but if done in private, the men in my social sphere have more intuition on what it means to live inside the mask of emotional mutilation and are more patient and gentle with the confused/clumsy way distress expresses itself in other men. a lot of people just want easy friendships and the shorthand for men, in my experience, is that we're easy to be friends with so long as we keep it light.
all my life growing up, i can't tell you how many times i heard women (not men) casually say shit like "i can't stand when old men cry" because they found it so distressing. like those documentaries where some old as hell WW2 vet would talk, after encouragement, about their traumatic experiences and get choked up... the commentary would be about how the one time they saw their grandfather cry, they were very disturbed by it. "didn't know what to do/felt helpless." with absolutely zero awareness of the collective role we all have in pushing men to keep a lid things, as though we weren't taught to be like this by literally everyone around us, not just the men in our lives.
how often? seldom-ish lately. though it comes and goes. i feel that i have been in more of a emotional support provider role of late, due to some stuff going on with a friend and some other family stuff.... but nobody seems to be doing well. it's disgusting to me personally how much emphasis is placed on professional/economic productivity as some kind of index for fulfillment. like, if you keep your head down, do your job, pay your bills, and save for a rainy day.... that's all there is to it. edification, self-understanding/mastery, non-monetized hobbies feel regarded as eccentricity/elective. when i saw that headline about how everybody in america has depression now, i was like, "no shit."
i have to echo the fear of sharing complex emotions with others, in general, is that the others will express disinterest or otherwise act in a way to discourage it... and how that fear is routinely validated by the way others have been socialized to react to men looking for emotional support. aside from close family, my better experiences in being vulnerable are with other men. not all of them, but if done in private, the men in my social sphere have more intuition on what it means to live inside the mask of emotional mutilation and are more patient and gentle with the confused/clumsy way distress expresses itself in other men. a lot of people just want easy friendships and the shorthand for men, in my experience, is that we're easy to be friends with so long as we keep it light.
all my life growing up, i can't tell you how many times i heard women (not men) casually say shit like "i can't stand when old men cry" because they found it so distressing. like those documentaries where some old as hell WW2 vet would talk, after encouragement, about their traumatic experiences and get choked up... the commentary would be about how the one time they saw their grandfather cry, they were very disturbed by it. "didn't know what to do/felt helpless." with absolutely zero awareness of the collective role we all have in pushing men to keep a lid things, as though we weren't taught to be like this by literally everyone around us, not just the men in our lives.
deleted by creator