Why do we not normalize male emotions?

I recently was going through my Facebook posts for some reason I decided to go back in time and just start deleting posts that were random. I started deleting posts where I was checking in to movie theaters letting people know what movies I was watching. I started deleting posts that were just angry outbursts of frustration. I believe in my early years I used my Facebook as free therapy to vent my feelings.

After going back in time from present day 2021 all the way back to 2012 I was reading my old works, reading my old posts and deleting pictures, comments, statements, things that maybe I no longer believe or things that didn’t match with who I am today. During this time travel back in time into my own thoughts I came to a few realizations. By age thirty I was an angry person. Many of my posts involved profanity, anger towards the MTA, anger towards the job I disliked, anger towards my family and anger towards a toxic environment. I had so much anger in my heart and it seemed to be the only emotion that I understood well. I knew that I was angry. I knew where some of the anger was coming from but I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to vent my rage. I didn’t know how to turn that rage into a positive force or how to turn it towards a positive hobby. I knew absolutely nothing about controlling the rage within me.

Looking at myself today, am I still this angry person? No. I have become something else. Now I am calmer, I have more Zen in my life and there are things that upset me but I find better ways to deal with them now. So the version of me from 2012 to the version of me in 2021 are two very complete strangers and I asked myself what has changed in all that time? I have been in different relationships. I have heard the complaints from my partners, one being that I don’t open up, I don’t tell them what’s on my mind or I rarely ever tell them when I feel sad. It has been this lack of emotions that has been the downfall of many of my relationships in my lifetime. So when asked why would I not open up and just be vulnerable and share what I’m feeling or share what I’m thinking I realize for a long time I couldn’t do those things. Until now in my life I did not have the understanding of the emotions I was feeling or the language to be able to fully express what I was feeling.

Why did I not have the language to express what I was feeling? Why did I not have the tools that I needed to deal with the emotions I was experiencing? How could I even identify those emotions in the first place? That’s when I realized I grew up without a father figure in my life for the majority of it. I grew up without my mother in my life for the majority of it and was raised by a strong grandmother. Now because of how I was raised and with whom I was raised there were not many opportunities for boys to express emotions. In school if a boy was injured or cried or was sad they were told to stop crying “to man up” as they say because it was not the place for a boy to cry that is what we were told. At home if a boy had a problem with a female neighbor or got into an argument the boy was told to apologize while the girl was allowed to cry. The boy was not allowed the same courtesy. Growing up there seemed to be a fear of a boy not being masculine. Boys were not allowed to play with dolls. Boys were not allowed to sit in the pink chair because some adult said that that’s not something boys do. Boys don’t cry. Boys don’t cook. Boys don’t clean; these are all things women do. Obviously I don’t believe those antiquated statements. I don’t even think as a child I believed them. I thought something was wrong there. So when do we get as males a chance to learn what our emotions are? In school we don’t get that opportunity to learn what our emotions are. There was no social emotional learning when I was in school. From a young age we learned that if we have a bully we have a problem we use our fists. That is how we solve our problems not through talking, not through our feelings but through violence. Years later as young adults 18 years old we are told that we are old enough to go into the army, we are old enough to get shots, we are old enough to die in another country. Yet that same 18 year old 19 year old does not know how to deal with sadness and does not know how to express depression. Even with an entire group of friends we don’t open up we don’t know how to and so we bottle up our emotions. Those bottled up emotions become toxic, we become angry and that becomes the only emotion we’re allowed to show the world.

I sit and watch cartoons and sometimes I cry and if anyone has watched the Avatar series and that scene where uncle Iroh honors his dead son that brings me to tears. For anyone who’s seen the Avatar series where Prince Zuko meets up with his uncle one more time and apologizes and he’s hugged and shown unconditional love, how many of us men would love to have that feeling of unconditional love and to have a safe space to express what we feel. We as a male species have been so separated from our emotions for so long that confronting those emotions and finding them is terrifying. As we get older and we get more experience we are starting to discover our feelings and emotions. So if I have any advice for people in relationships, it’s not that we don’t want to share our deepest darkest feelings, it’s that we are having the hardest time finding them, identifying them and being able to talk about them. Let’s start normalizing that boys have feelings too that way the next generation will have men who are more emotionally stable. Emotionally stable men will make better partners, better fathers, better role models for those who come after.