Emotional Archeology, Part 1
By Saint Idiot
Saint Idiot (Tomáš Andel) is an NGM friend, art pop musician and self-described ‘Masculinity Explorer’ from Edmonton, on Treaty 6 territory. Here, for the Pass the Mic Summer Reading Series and readers of the Future of Masculinity newsletter, Saint Idiot has written a companion piece to Talk, the lead single off his new album. Saint Idiot wants us to talk—really talk—and to lead us on a journey, going from a place of smallness and fear to one of expansive self-love, starting right now.
Emotional Archeology, Part 1
My name is Tomáš Andel. I’m a Slovak-Canadian ‘art pop’ musician going by the oxymoron Saint Idiot. I see myself as a deeply feeling, deeply curious person, and the music I make is much the same—a curious, surprising, playful attempt to crack my own heart open as wide as can be.
The album I’m currently releasing took the last two years of my life to produce, but most of my life to germinate. It came to be when I had the realization that I had spent most of my life in a particular type of silence I wasn’t even aware of inhabiting—an unexamined barrier between me and other men.
This realization, and the album that then hatched from it, are part of a personal journey that has consistently taken me from a place of smallness and detachment, to a place of expansiveness and wholeness—a process I would call healing.
Again and again, this journey has brought me in orbit of the question of masculinity, and again and again I’ve walked away more frustrated and perplexed. That is, until a few years ago, when I tripped on a chain of sudden insights. A few years ago, I learned to walk.
I had the enormous fortune of visiting Japan, and as a talented penny-pincher eating rice balls on ten Canadian a day, I pledged myself to walking. Walking has since become my most important practice. It’s my way of inhabiting myself, being my own watcher, cleaning out ‘the attic.’ I think some of my deepest introspection happens while walking.
I walked and I walked, until I saw the ground I had been standing on, and how shaky it was.
Walk for an hour and everything is pretty—walk for eight, and deep clean your heart.
I actually remember the moment I became the person I am today, the moment when I noticed a signpost in the road I had hitherto been blind to. I had just committed to walking several hours from Osaka station to my hostel deep in the night. It was 2017 and, meanwhile, in my Twitter neighbourhood, the hashtag #MeToo had just coalesced into digital wildfire.
Watching it happen felt both remote and far away, but also subterranean, right here, like a tiny tremor in the earth. I didn’t think it concerned me—throughout my entire life, I had thought of myself as a ‘good man.’ I knew I was a good guy, unconsciously but also with a kind of ‘of course’ about it. But then I started walking.
I walked and I walked, and I moved my feet until I started to see the ground I had been standing on, and how shaky it was. It didn’t take all that long before I concluded that I had never actually examined the foundations I based my ‘of course’ on.
I began that work down the road, and I discovered just how disconnected, fractured, frustrated, self-involved, short-sighted, and un-empathetic I was. This strange place inside of me, that I had never visited before, was booby-trapped. I went inside myself, and I found it dark and full of defence mechanisms working hard to turn me back around.
It quickly turned out that my ‘good man’ character was maintained by a story of myself that came to be at some point in the past, but remained in the first draft indefinitely. Its premises had long expired, and it clung to me by the gravity of convenience.
If this happens to resonate, know right from the top that I’m not condemning either of us. On the contrary, I want to invite you to look at yourself with kind, understanding eyes. For most people, it is true that when we know better, we do better, as Maya Angelou put it. For most of us it’s mostly a question of how to know better.
Up until that point, I learned most of what I knew about interpersonal relationships at other peoples’ expense—most often, my partner’s. I just thought that’s how it was. I deferred such an obscene portion of the work of self-discovery onto other people. Sure, we all discover stuff about ourselves in the mirror of other people—it’s one of the most potent beauties of human connection. But we’ll also end up hurting a lot of them along the way if we ourselves don’t proactively do inner work. It’s a two-way street.
Just then, a little voice in my head pronounced, “Don’t task other people with the work of making yourself a good person.” And this voice was new.
“Don’t make your self-betterment other people’s labour.”
Oh. Oooooh.
On the raised rail, the empty Chūō Line glided by and painted the wet pavement in flashbulb colours for one brief moment. The ground shook.
Four years ago I was twenty-six. How did I go twenty-six years of my life before I started asking myself these questions? A whole twenty-six years without looking another man in the eye and asking, “Do you, like…get this masculinity thing?”
I was a pretty weird boy. Not much has changed, either. Pretty solitary, really unathletic, kind of pretentious and preoccupied with twerpy things (do you want to read my forty-eight page Star Wars fan film I wrote when I was eleven?).
But I consumed enough ‘boyish’ pop culture to keep a handful of pals through junior high and high school. Our fare was: bailing at lunch to play Brawl, biking for hours and talking about the band Tool, and shooting videos in the style of Tim and Eric. If you’re turning thirty, perhaps that sounds par for the course.
After high school, something happened to me, and it took me a long time to notice it. While I became a lot more social and kept a huge network of friends, less and less of them were men.
Eventually, I noticed why—it was because I could instantly form deeper relationships with just about anyone but men. Sure I had a very select handful of good, deep, intimate male friendships, but talking and connecting with anyone else was just easier most of the time.
I’m sure a large part of why I had a lot of ‘girl friends,’ for one, is simply because I was romantically adventurous for so many years—but a lot of these friendships are still close, reciprocal friendships I value and nurture to this day. I think that the ability to really connect with my partners in a way I could not with most men drove my dating life as much as my libido did.
The first time I defeated my pride and went to see a counselor was on the advice of one of my exes. She was also the one who unpacked me past my then cool, disinterested exterior and saw the artist in me, and convinced me to apply to university, which hadn’t even crossed my mind before. The first few times I really humanized my parents was through the eyes of my partners. My close male friends held me through calamities too, and I’m not trying to ignore that, but those were exceptions to the rule. Not many men were available to me in that way, and I’m starting to think I wasn’t available to them either.
My social life being so disproportionately filled with women messed with me. I didn’t know what to make of it then—was I about to realize I was sex-addicted or something? I was very conscious of the way it appeared, and I spent more time managing appearances than unpacking this observation.
So I started to be self-conscious about the amount of women I interacted with. I started to be self-conscious about forming bonds with women. Then, in turn, I started to be aware of how distant I felt from men. With that realization I concluded that maybe ‘I wasn’t a man.’
For a time, I started to keep my distance from ‘the masculine’—in a subconscious way, in the wake of #MeToo, in the wake of cancellations, this seemed like a survival strategy whether I consciously intended it that way or not. If I could circumnavigate masculinity altogether and signal to society that ‘I’m different, I’m safe,’ I could at least go about my life and keep forming these bonds that so sustained me.
I didn’t feel seen in masculinity, and I didn’t want to be seen with masculinity because I didn’t want to inherit that aura of danger—the ‘will he try to do something to me,’ the ‘what if he can’t take rejection and starts stalking me,’ the ‘what if he’s putting on the sweetness now but will one day hit me?’
In my life, I went to some extraordinary lengths to avoid the question of my own identity.
For a while, tongue in cheek, I entertained the idea that my gender was ‘cartoon’—which, if you know me personally, actually tracks well enough. But of course—‘haha’—past the initial joke, that’s just an escape strategy—a way to bypass the question of identity with humour.
Then, for a while, I explored whether seeing myself as non-binary felt right, and from the outside, that could track too—for a time I did experiment with presenting my gender more ambiguously, and many people have referred to me by they/them in the past just out of an abundance of caution.
That wasn’t right either though, and while my exploration was open-hearted and genuine, it was to some degree also motivated by my striving to find some category of inclusion in a frequently shifting and ambiguous social world. For me specifically, that would have been a kind of easy absolution, I think.
Still, at nearly thirty, ‘man’ is just not a noun that dresses me well—the sleeves hang, so to speak—but I understand that I’ve orbited this category my whole life, and while I’ve never felt I fit it neatly, I can appreciate that it's still the most fitting map for the territory. So, in the end, I accepted that I am a man, because any other category simply seems like too much of a stretch.
For me, a more helpful way of thinking has been to accept a wide plurality of masculinities. One of my best friends, while being interviewed for a documentary exploring masculinity, said that there is no right or wrong way to be a man, a woman, or to have a body. Contemplating that simple truth has been a lot more useful to me, personally, than approaching from the angle of language and category.
The nice thing is—now that I accept this—I can accept the good and the bad, and work with it. Now that I’ve laid the foundation of self-acceptance, it falls on me to be a good man, in the way all people just strive to be good people. I can work from this territory.
I am going to learn to own myself completely. Arriving at this decision took a surprising amount of self honesty.
At least now I am ready to have brutally genuine conversations—when I started my practice of long walking, the locomotion of self-honesty had sprung into action too.
I wouldn’t have been honest with people before this. I needed to first be honest with myself. The walking had to be done.
So I am forced to return to the question—why do I have a hard time forming meaningful bonds with other men?
Keep reading: Emotional Archeology, Part 2
From the Future of Masculinity weekly newsletter, where our community’s hearts and minds come together each week to do the work, tell the stories, and build the blueprint for a future where men and boys experience less pain and cause less harm.
Saint Idiot (Tomáš Andel) is a Slovak-Canadian art pop musician from Edmonton. In his new album, Alternate Utopias from a Nostalgic Future, Saint Idiot embarks on what he calls “adventures in brutal self-honesty” and sets about interrogating episodes from his own life. In this article, written as a companion piece to his lead single Talk Andel tells us about the defense mechanisms he tripped in the process of going deep within, and how he's learned to be a fuller, more whole self in the process.