Emotional Archeology, Part 2

 
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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. The album is a document of what Saint Idiot calls ‘adventures in brutal self-honesty’—here, in the article’s conclusion, he completes his internal excavation into relationships and gender.

“Having a tough conversation, and running into a building to save someone in an earthquake, is the same in its mental quality—an act of courage.”

Why do I have a hard time forming meaningful bonds with other men?

My non-male friendships were often the only places where I felt comfortable talking about my emotions in nuanced dialogue. The only places where the emotional ambience wasn’t actively being hidden or bypassed by humour or small talk. 

Here, conflict was less likely to devolve into weird spasms of ego and aggression, and could be solved comparatively easily just by practising better communication and self-honesty. 

In this refuge, intimacy wasn’t this exclusive reward bestowed only upon that one ‘special’ person in your life—rather, it was a distributed network of freely exchanged emotional labour, closeness, and even gentle touch. (A good hug goes a long way.)

By contrast, at least in my observation, most men prefer to appoint their partner as their only site of emotional expression. Men, while they can be quick to put all their emotional eggs into one person’s basket, will at the same time go to great lengths to make sure, if they do have to truly open up to one another, that it’s rare, quick, and controlled.

I say this because I was this person, and I can tell when other men are struggling against this confining view. The distributed model of intimacy present elsewhere seems, generally, wildly out of rank among men.

What, then, is standing in the way of men and this kind of nuanced intimacy? Is it a competency issue? Is it a design flaw in our usual ways of relating? Is it simply a symptom of not giving enough fucks?

I’ve spent so much of my life dealing with soups of illegible emotions that felt like nothing more than vague internal pressures. When someone upset me, I couldn’t even articulate how they could help me or fix their transgressions. I’m not sure I knew why I was even upset half the time. 

Once, when I was 17, I punched a hole in my Ford Escort’s dashboard because I found myself in this brand of mute, frozen panic attack brought on by an inability to untangle my immediate emotions. Poor car? Sure, sure—poorer the person witnessing this from the passenger seat—one of my exes.

I hadn’t spent any time self-observing, learning to discern emotions and studying their causes and effects, how they felt in my body, or how they affected the reality I inhabited. 

“Anger is like a howling baby, suffering and crying,” Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh says in his book Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames. “The moment you begin to practice breathing mindfully in and out, you have the energy of a mother, to cradle and embrace the baby, [and] it will feel relief right away.”

I wish I knew those words when I was a directionless teenager pushed this way and that by the uncharted waters. Instead, for years after my outburst, I ignored anger instead, and convinced myself that ‘I didn’t do anger.’

I conflated feeling anger with being an angry person.

If there’s ever been a life circumstance where developing my emotional intelligence and empathy was an existential consideration—if I ever came close to cultivating this competency, I was still given obscene allowance to not have to do it. 

Some of those allowances are cultural and tend to go without saying—‘men are allowed to be angry,’ or ‘it’s OK for a man to be cold,’—while other allowances were given to me by individuals who feared ‘the man in me’ acting out. (That’s why they never pressed the issues home.) 

In my case, mix the romantic ‘irrational artist’ trope into all this, and I become a real mess.

It doesn’t help that there are certain already established, strong, prevalent, institutional codes of masculinity to stand on. When there’s so much stuff to worry about in life already, you can perhaps see how reflecting on masculinity can seem like a superfluous venture at first glance. At the very least, even with best intentions, it's easy to put it off.

The bottom line is, learning emotional intelligence was never a matter of survival for me. 

An object at rest stays at rest. That’s pure inertia. 

The pressure to cultivate these competencies simply can’t reach me when everywhere I turn I am given a second chance and a runway. There’s no sense of urgency, no back-to-the-wall moment where I—or lots of men like me—are made to face up to our dire need to develop our emotional language.

And with no sense of urgency, that emotional language—emotional literacy—tends not to develop of its own accord.

For me, it took until my late, late twenties to really see this, and to begin undoing the defence mechanism of projecting my own shadow onto other men. Now I’m finally seeing past the smokescreen.

Taking on this self-exploration has greatly enlarged the bubble of my possible selves. When I became aware of just what an expansive being I was, when I wasn’t denying entire dimensions of my experience as a human, such as my emotional reality, I began to see that this reality was like a field that encompassed me, but also penetrated the people around me.

Once I understood that—after a long, long while—I saw I had no choice but to do the inner work of aligning my reality with a happier, more whole self. It wasn’t just about me anymore; it was about my place in something far more interconnected and expansive.

Honestly, it’s kind of like dominoes from there—a wild, beautiful, never-ending ride of arriving fully into myself all the time. I can’t think of a sensation more satisfying than how this process feels as it unfolds. Even when I have to atone for something harmful I have done in the past, which has caused great pain and is indeed still painful to atone for and integrate, I still feel like a karmic knot is being untied, like ghosts dissipating. I am liberated from my past, less-skillful self. 

I can only hope that I keep leap-frogging over my past selves in this way for the rest of my life.

All I really want to say is that I am happy for all the men who were where I was and also found this pivot in their life. I like to imagine that another boy much like me, sometime in the not-too-distant future, will be surrounded by men who found reasons to defeat the inertial forces of masculine codes before they’ve been hurt and incurred collateral damage, and came in contact with the larger reality, where rich inner dimensions of life we tend to habitually hide away are as self-evident a part of reality as the electromagnetic spectrum. 

If more men had mentored me, fed me these insights, and encouraged me to get in touch with this side of myself, I can’t fathom how happy I could’ve been long, long ago.

Even when I finally learned to feel my emotions in this way, I still spent so much time in silence, thinking ‘well I don’t have these things figured out yet, so I don’t want to talk about them for fear of embarrassment.’ As if people needed to be protected from my imperfect self. I also didn’t want to ask for help because I thought that I didn’t have the capacity to return it. I was so scared of being a burden.

But I think these fears often rule men’s inability to work on these things together. We want to be strong, perfect, and potent, because that’s traditionally supposed to be ‘our thing.’ Nothing scares us more than the full incapacitation of a seemingly indigestible emotion. 

A close second maybe, in the grand race of existential fears, is not knowing how we can be helped, or even how to ask for help. Traditions and visions of masculinity want us to believe we’re these potent problem solvers, after all. So, we tend to think we cannot contribute until we perfect our understanding of all these things.

This approach has hurt me repeatedly.

To me, humility means going out there with an open-heart and engaging in these conversations despite, or even precisely because we’re not perfect. In a way, that’s why I’m writing this now—not to say that I have come into full humility, but to admit that I don’t have it down pat, and I want help. 

I want all of us to help one another. I want to talk.

Humility also means that when we cause hurt, we accept and atone for it. It means that when we have the facts wrong, we are willing to self-correct. It means being capable of being witnessed in the act of changing course, admitting ‘after all, what I did was not so skillful and I ended up causing harm, and now I know better.’

It’s a full, unblemished, deep ‘I’m sorry,’ without the frantic make-up of rationalizing our own actions. Just: I’m sorry—I did that thing that hurt you, and I can scarcely imagine how atrocious it must have felt—I resolve to own that.

Whoever you are, wherever you come from, this is the kind of circle I want to sit in with you, to see you and hold you here, along with the others. Neither of us need to be silent anymore—suffering in silence is not noble, and nobody can be compassionate towards a question mark. While I’ve been talking primarily about men, really, I want to relate this way to everyone.

In this way, with this mentality, we can develop the vocabulary of emotions on our own terms—men between men, conversing, healing, modelling, crediting, iterating, in a way appropriate and skillful to our realities, and in conversation with the wider society.

We live in a world where people pocket good change off of our antagonism. We cast ourselves against one another in indefatigable breadwinner roles, in a job market that just loves it when we do. (I’m not even a father yet, and I can feel the pressure from here.) Capitalism and patriarchy intertwine and thrive on our mutual competition and dehumanization. You’re providing for your brood, and you can only be the top dog if you’re willing to kill.

These systems profit from making a false division between our ‘useful, productive’ self and our human self. Under these circumstances, we are expected to work endlessly, get ahead, become hyper-independent, and start treating anything that gets in the way of our competitiveness as a weakness. If you can always be simply outcompeted, how can you not feel a perpetual, paralyzing vulnerability? Let me ask you, what space is there left in this picture for that emotional reality I’ve been sketching out?

The list of casualties: love, emotions, quality time, friendships, inner work, difficult conversations, interpersonal relationships, the environment, our health, in the end even our family, and other dimensions of our common humanness that disappear in the filter of market value. 

What are we doing when we are letting these casualties pile up? In our competitiveness, are we perhaps seeking the last vestiges of control over our lives? Does this rugged, caricatured sense of individualism give us a sense of comfort and safety? Does it promise us that we won’t get swept under the carpet?

The planet can no longer sustain the influence of ‘rational man,’ homo economicus, the profit maximizing powerhouse who sees his already crumbled relationship to the world as just the charred remains of weakness, as opposed to what it really is—a wound of separation. 

A lot of us are unable to connect to much outside of ourselves, driven towards nihilism by the twin pressures of ingrained traditional masculine expectations and their incompatibility with living a healthy, wholesome life on a finite planet. This incompatibility tears me apart all the time, and I walk away from it humiliated, angry, and often blinded to the myriad small choices I have about the kind of man I can be. 

I want to learn how to not be controlled by this hustle. I want to learn to not feel humiliated by my bank account.

I am a silo unto myself if I remain in this state.

Next thing I know, I’ll be paranoid. I’ll return to my guarded posturing. The deep resignation. The existential boredom. Maybe a midlife crisis car? I’ll feel short-changed in the grocery store check-out, and somehow I’ll feel short-changed when the trends change too. The stinginess. My existential grounds will continue shaking and I’ll continue retreating farther and farther into the one shell I know—chasing chump change dopamine hits from ‘optimizing my productivity,’ all on my damn lonesome.

What we’re all left with is courage. We need courage, and some healthy leaps of faith to make bridges across this treacherous water, instead of retreating into that place.

Being courageous and having tough conversations in spite of whatever particular political or cultural climate. Having a tough conversation, and running into a building to save someone in an earthquake, is the same in its mental quality—an act of courage. It takes great courage to have true, genuine, long, arduous, humble, self-honest, compassionate, and well-intentioned conversations with other people, and often even harder to do that with ourselves. Look within, then tend your garden.

Be the balm for other people, too. That person you’re thinking of cutting out of your life—meet them. Your nephew clothing himself awkwardly in teenage machismo and yelling at his girlfriend—model something better for him.

When we turn outwards and start to nurture solid, resilient, genuine connections with all the people around us, when we learn to distribute our emotional needs like this, we create a strong social fabric. We become held, safe. We thrive. We breathe easier. Weirdly, we are freer to be ourselves when we stop being in it for ourselves.

It’s a weird paradox, but, when you’re always taking, you’re just taking from yourself.

In my song Talk, I imagine a scene—a conversation taking place on the front steps of someone’s home. I don’t know what it is about the act of sitting on someone’s front steps, half in the home and half in the world. Maybe it’s the confounding of that boundary of what is ours but private and bound up, and what is ours but connected to the larger world. Maybe it’s because this is the place we rest after we’ve done our share of walking. Maybe because the front step is the first step.

The first step to building a just, fair society is to be fully, completely tuned into the person right across from you—that’s your pathway to being tuned into the rest of everyone. If you want a just and fair society, bring it to the people near you first. It’s an unsung form of generosity.

The front step. This weird twilight space brings me memories of so many dusk-lit heart to hearts. It’s a special space—informal, but public. Leisured, calm, just as these conversations should start. In my song and the imagery around it, I repeatedly allude to sitting on the stairs and talking, because this place is one of the many special birthplaces of the kinds of conversations that we need to have but keep putting off.

You don’t need a front porch, or stairs. Find this liminal place in your life where pretentions crack, and bring people into this space. Sip on something nice together. Hold them there. Listen to them with your entire body, and let them return the favour. Be tuned in—nothing less than full communication. You’re building a just, fair society right here, at this moment. Be gentle and forgiving with yourselves. Be careful, thorough, and reverent with one another’s feelings—like a brush to a fossil, cleaning, clarifying, making sense of—emotional archeology.


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.