Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity

by Justin Baldoni

At the time, so many people were putting me on a pedestal like I had some secret ingredient that could help men become better, and that in turn could help women, but that pedestal made me extremely uncomfortable because I was honestly just doing the bare minimum yet that was still separating me in some ways from other men.

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

If shame thrives in silence and isolation, then the opposite must be true: shame dies in speaking up and in community.

But there’s an upside, as that discomfort is now how I know I need to listen and that it’s actually good for me. I learned recently that if I change my relationship to the feedback and don’t take it personally—i.e., as an attack on me—and instead think of it as a way to help myself grow to become a better man, friend, human, etc., then I am not only able to hear it better, but I can also reframe it as a challenge and actually implement the feedback. This reframing has perhaps been one of the most important steps in my personal growth.

Maybe we have to make love less a matter of the operatic performance and more about the inner experience of connection and intimacy, revealed less in the heroic sacrifice and more in the everyday things, the practicalities of everyday life. That’s what we should romanticize. After all, the little things really are the big things, right?

Many of the ways my dad was parenting me were the exact opposites of the way he was parented. On one hand, this is awesome. It’s how every generation gets better and improves on itself. It’s how cycles of abuse and traumas are stopped and how we make progress as a collective species. But I believe that true healing has to occur first, otherwise even though we are making different choices than our parents did, our childhood wounds find their way in through cracks we can’t see or that we didn’t know were there in the first place.

It’s ironic—painful sometimes, gratifying at other times—that the people you love most are also the ones who test you the most. For me, it’s easy to be brave and open in front of strangers and friends, but it’s much harder to be 100 percent authentically who I am in front of those who really, really know me.