Vachon Imagined

The pressure we place on men is real.

I hear it all the time.

People speak as though my son, still just a child, is already responsible for someone else’s daughter, someone else’s family, someone else’s country, someone else’s future.

It is an astonishing weight to place upon a human being who is only beginning to discover who he is.

Even as adults, men are not exempt from being human.

Like everyone else, they live between memory and anticipation. A memory appears, and they react. Fear arises, and they feel it. Anger comes, and they wrestle with it. Love awakens, and they attach. Hope arrives, and they reach toward it.

They are not so different from women in this regard.

Yet we often ask them to become something more than human.

We tell them to be a man.

We tell them to man up.

I’ve said it myself.

I’ve heard women say it countless times.

Beneath those words is often a longing for strength—a hope that someone else can carry what feels too heavy for us to bear.

But no one can carry another person’s wounds.

No man can.

Not because he lacks strength, but because he is already carrying the weight of being human.

He becomes tired.

He doubts himself.

He suffers.

He wonders if he is enough.

Like every one of us, he bears the evidence of his own afflictions.

Last night, as my son and I walked home from a birthday party, I thought about all of this.

He is ten years old.

The world will tell him to be strong.

It will tell him to hide fear, suppress uncertainty, and prove himself.

So I told him something different.

I told him to face his fears.

To let insecurity come.

To let anxiety rain if it must.

To stop running from what it means to be human.

Walk through it.

Because courage is not the absence of fear.

Strength is not the absence of tears.

Manhood is not the absence of vulnerability.

Strength is the willingness to remain present with your own experience without allowing it to define you.

That is not simply the work of a man.

It is the work of every human being who has ever lived.

And if my son can learn that while he is still a boy, perhaps he will grow into a man who no longer believes he must carry the whole world on his shoulders before he is worthy of being loved.