When did I become my own man?
Every man is sculpted from the bedrock of his own soul — shaped by the trials of his life, the crucibles that yield an identity uniquely his. Some men, if you ask them, are aware of this slow forging. Others are not. And to get a man to explain his own becoming often is like probing in the dark, led by someone without sight.
As a young man, led by men without sight, I was out of touch with my own sense of self. Like a chameleon, I changed form to survive. I learned to be liked so I wouldn't be bullied. I learned to mask my insecurities so I'd seem strong. I learned to hide my fear and my weakness so I might pass for an adult. This mask — a simulacra — became my undoing.
These masks haunted me, even after my schooling days when I stepped into working full time. It was in this season I was only beginning to sense what I wanted to become, while feeling held back by everything the institutions of our world required of me. Coupled with the masks I wore, I was left confused: Who was I but a man moved to action only to fit in or keep up?
This incongruence — the gap between the hidden me on the inside and the person my life required me to be on the outside — bred in me an inexplicable rage. Maybe you can relate.
That anger fueled me… for a while. Anger at the world for forcing me to become someone I knew I was not. This transition toward real manhood — my crucible — only made me angrier. And then my mother died of colon cancer.
Throughout her treatment, she called on God to save her. Pastors and congregants laid hands on her failing body; they wept, believing He could heal her. I wept because I knew He would not.
Losing her made me realize I was truly on my own — and that one day I too will die, hurting everyone I love in the process, leaving gaps in them the way her death left many in me. Some of those wounds, even now, have never fully closed. Facing our mortality is something men don't like to talk about. Have you?
After she was gone, rage consumed me again. It drove me to work, to perform, to drive too fast on the highway. It became a blanket — a familiar friend that always brought beer, and formed for me an early definition of what it meant to be a man: to be angry, in your bones, at everyone and no one.
It is that anger — and the grief buried beneath it — that led me to this show.
I've learned, over the years, that some men find their way out of this rageful place — that they trade their anger for hope. Each does it his own way, through a crucible that is his alone; no two paths the same, each life its own universe, its own constellation of experiences no one else could have lived. In each of them, it seems, a seed that had waited through a long winter finally caught the light and began, at last, to grow.
As a fellow traveler on this road, I'll be honest with you: I have not reached that place yet. And so I keep searching the stories of other men for the answers to my own.
Maybe that is the one extraordinary thing we can offer each other — not a map, but the truth of how we each found our way through. I hope this show can be a light on your path, and help you find the answers you seek.
Steve
