What am I building all of this for?
To plant a seed is a hopeful exercise. It may grow into a mighty oak, or it may wither after a brief but beautiful bloom. Some seeds never sprout at all — they lie dormant for years, waiting for the right conditions. That is how it has felt to build this show. For a tree to one day stand, first a seed must be planted; I am still not sure which of mine will take root. But I plant them anyway.
Watching the men in my life — each one a beautiful, mysterious snowflake of a life, no two the same, each a universe unto itself — I have witnessed a loneliness they rarely name. Men so often work in isolation, away from their families, in order to provide. They process their emotions internally, never letting anyone see how they carry them. That combination — isolation on the outside, silence on the inside — has shaped a generation of men who struggle to connect with each other in any deep way, who have come to believe that showing what they feel is unnatural, and who accept the loneliness of their working lives as a given, something to be made peace with.
This way of living for men has come with immense cost — and the cost is not abstract. It is measured in men. According to the CDC, men account for nearly 80% of all suicide deaths in the United States, dying by suicide at roughly four times the rate of women. They are far more likely, too, to engage in the risk-taking that kills quietly: men make up about 70% of deaths from drug overdose and alcohol-related disease, and their alcohol-related death rates run two to four times higher than women's. These are the "deaths of despair" — suicide, overdose, alcohol — and they fall on men with a weight our culture rarely names aloud. The internal processing, the isolation, the absence of real relationships: these are not signs of strength. They are risk factors for an early death. If this is so, why do we keep molding ourselves to this stoic vision of manhood? Will this be the legacy our boys inherit? Will this be their model for what it means to be a man?
To spare my sons that inheritance, I went looking inside myself for what I would need to put down the masks and grow into my full self. What became clear was that I needed role models — men who were not afraid to feel their emotions in front of others, who leaned on a community of friends and family when times were hard, who could speak about their inner lives with insight and honesty. But when I went looking for a circle like that, I couldn't find one.
I didn't want a therapy group. I wanted an honest conversation — starting with the men closest to me, then rippling outward like a wave. If you've caught wind of this show, welcome to the wave. This is my seed of hope for the future. As a fellow traveler, my wish is that you find it to be a light on your path to self-discovery — learning, as I am, from the men who have passed through their own crucibles and come back to show us what it truly means to be a man. Because in the end, that may be the one extraordinary thing we can offer each other: not a map, but the truth of how we each found our way through.
