I don’t remember the exact moment that people decided I was a man.
But at some point, people stopped asking me for directions as often. Seats on buses and the metro next to mine usually stayed empty.
When you’re a man, you come into inheritances that society has decided you will now have. When the world says you’re a man, it decides to give you your own space.
The big bold text, floating around the life of every man, is the physical space he occupies; as well as the mental one. Space that society has decreed no one else dare enter, and thus in every man’s space also is a stillness.
Inheritances often come in pairs, and space’s companion is silence; an ever present loneliness.
In the study of disease, we learn about risk factors. Rarely though, we also study about an aggravating factor- a ‘something’ that causes other things to move quicker, resulting in manifestations that are a little more intense.
Loneliness is an aggravating factor.
Men are taught to be proud of our strength and encouraged to do everything by ourselves and when the child in us looks around for guidance, the people who offered it so freely a few years ago, beat that child out of us.
The ‘strong, silent type’ is an acquired attribute..
The cornerstone of recovery from mental illness, and for the maintenance of mental health is support; which is also the one thing in all the world that men don’t have.
There is a mens’ mental health crisis, but like everything else in a man’s life, it exists in the space only he has access to. The epidemiology of men’s mental health is in the things he does disclose.
The issue is one ripe with contradictions and irony, because though men have been talking everyone’s ears off since humans could speak, the one thing we still need to learn to do is speak up. Our need to ask for help is so deeply buried under centuries of old, dusty convention that its only remnants are in the subtexts.
Thus the only practical way to deal with this crisis, is to learn to understand the space around men and the subtexts it contains.
~By Pranav