My dad trained himself not to see the evidence that disproved his beliefs. That’s a hard thing to grow up with. I had to content myself to reside within the false parameters that he had established which were designed to serve him and only him.
Nobody can live like that.
The toxic patriarchal mindset is an abomination. It’s a powder keg. It makes men feel they must become the all time winner. If they are caught losing even once, it invokes the existential threat of identity death.
Yes, it feels good to live in a perpetual present of your peak moment. But the fact is, life is a rollercoaster filled with ups and downs. If your entire ability to derive joy from life is dependent on maintaining a delusion, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.
The fact is we fail. We fail again and again. The reason we forge strong relationships is so that the people close to us can carry us when we’re weak. It’s cooperation. It’s nurturing. It’s the matriarchal mindset.
Men who have been infected with the toxic patriarchy wouldn’t so much as submit to owning a dog. They consider all forms of connection to be weakness, even as they deeply long for connection.
They’re tormented by their loneliness even as they live by a set of rules that makes connection impossible.
It gets worse.
No matter how much you try to control the narrative about your perfection or your superiority, the cracks are going to appear. No matter how much you try to push people away, relationships are going to happen.
Toxic men want sex. Sex leads to children. Those children become witnesses to a life of ineptitude and failure.
Those children are living, breathing evidence that these toxic patriarchal men are not the revered figures these men claim to be.
They become a direct threat to the ability of toxic men to maintain their delusion of identity.
In the best case scenarios this leads to estrangement.
In the worst case, infanticide.
Every problem in our society is derived from the inability of conservative men to embark on a journey of healthy emotional development. That’s why our country is being run by a bunch of murderous toddlers who throw a temper tantrum whenever they don’t get what they want.
They blow up schools full of children so they can feel “big and powerful” again. They’re loathsome creatures who insist on existing in a perpetual present who have trained themselves to deny that every action has a consequence.
They don’t want to hear about consequences because it “makes them feel bad about themselves.”
On my next birthday, I will have spent half of my life estranged from my own father. Some people criticize me for this.
“You only have one father.”
“You’re so ungrateful.”
“What would it take to repair the relationship?”
The pressure is always directed at me, never at him. This is because we live in a society that has been forged into a pipeline to protect and enable the very worst traits of toxic masculinity.
These odious men only have to sit down and slide into the Oval Office leaving pain, ruin, and misery in their wake. They laugh the whole time calling anyone who criticizes them a “snowflake,” even though these are the weakest men of all.
The people who criticize me always make the mistake of thinking that I didn’t try to repair my relationship with my own father. They’re wrong. I tried. I tried for longer and harder and with more innate emotional knowledge than anyone who has ever lived.
As the universe is my witness, I tried.
Without fail, every time I talked to him he steered the discussion to his feelings. It was always how my criticisms made him feel bad about himself.
“Why aren’t you recognizing that when you say things like that it makes me feel bad?”
This was the language he used to bludgeon me into silence. It took me a long time to figure out what was happening.
The problem is that I was coming up against the boundaries he’d placed in his own perception to protect his fragile masculinity.
Whether I was 10, or 15, or 20, or 25, I was being met with arguments that had been in place and refined throughout his whole life.
He’d conditioned himself to disregard certain truths. His whole self identity consisted of remaining within a set of certain preestablished and corrupt parameters.
He had no interest in learning anything else. He had no interest in self-improvement. He’d spent the entire sum total of his life, and his considerable intelligence, fortifying his fortress of solitude rather than finding the courage to engage with the world.
Not once in my whole life have I ever heard him ask, “How are you doing? Are you well? How do you feel?”
He approaches every conflict entirely from the perspective of protecting his own faulty and fragile identity. He’s convinced himself that his life depends on this action. He has convinced himself that it is just.
It’s not.
It’s a perversion of life. It’s a tragedy.
There were many times during conversations where I brought him close to a truth he didn’t wish to recognize. I remember his physical rejection of the idea. His muscles would tense. His jaw would clench. His brow would furrow.
Next would come the rage. He became loud like a storm. He swung his arms like crashing waves. His eyes flashed like lightning. His voice sounded like thunder.
A tempest, all to drown out the truth he didn’t want to acknowledge.
He raged himself to exhaustion, and when he was done and the tide retreated, the truth remained like a rock battered by the sea.
They try to bludgeon us to accept their lie. They try to force us to live within the false parameters that they’ve defined.
But their world contradicts itself. It’s doomed to collapse under its own weight like any structure built upon a foundation of corruption.
They care only about their own feelings, but they won’t listen when you try to convince them you wish to save them. They retreat into their fortress of solitude.
And they die… alone.
If you try to go in to give them comfort, they’ll kill you.
Save yourself, like I did. Get out.
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