When You’re In the Shit, Start Taking Notes!

Men have an inner life. Men get emotionally abused. Men spend most of their lives saving face.

Women want men to show their true feelings until they don’t. Brene Brown implies this is the moment where they suddenly feel disgust.

In 1990, there were no resources available for men who had faced physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Any man who had the balls to face these issues could only find resources through women’s and feminist bookstores. I felt how far a man would go to save face with the demise of Epic62 in 2015. It becomes a shell game world. The holes in the system are there. The shell game is a seductive option. The game presents itself in the face of desperation. In the act of saving face, a guy digs himself deeper into the shit. I was lucky. One afternoon on the SE corner of Ivar and Vine as I was beginning to go through a desperation found hole, I saw where it would lead, Why so many men take this route. I stopped.

This may be because men’s abuse remains so normalized that it is virtually nonexistent. And It may be that the only way men will heal is from women able to transcend disgust and provide succor. And not from a place of submissiveness.

I’ve been a fool. I went back into a platonic relationship one year ago. I went through a hole out of desperation knowing her behavior but not its context. Knowing I was being coerced and thinking I had nowhere else to land. The option was seductive. While this desperation was real, I still needed to save face. The year has served its purpose. I’ve been diminished and primed to the false need to overcompensate for this diminishment. Overcompensating for the fact that I was breathing.

Like I said, I’ve been a fool. And I leave the relationship feeling beaten up and, in some ways, no different than I went into it.

And in another way, realized.

I hope.

A friend and therapist once told me, “When you are in the shit, start taking notes”

Standing behind an older Russian woman at checkout in the Studio City Whole Foods, she suddenly turns to me and says.

“We need men. Men work hard. I like men”