I Couldn’t Be Who I Wanted to Be: Boys and Stress
11/05/18 • 47 min
Stress wound its way into Michael’s life throughout his preteen years, growing in size until it overwhelmed him in his first year of high school. “It took over my life,” he told me. “I’d come home and do four hours of homework. This took a toll on my social life, and my physical health. I began to develop an eating disorder, which I still have to battle to this day. I lost a lot of weight. I became more of an unhappy person. I wasn’t fun to be around. I didn’t enjoy being around other people. I just felt like my life was a mess.”
“It was painful, to see my life almost crumbling. Because of schoolwork, or my friends, or just something that was stressing me out so much I couldn’t be who I wanted to be. It was really just—it’s painful to think about now, it was painful to go through then. I’m still going through it.”
Things came to a head when Michael broke his leg and missed several weeks of school. He did his best to keep up with schoolwork in his absence, but the pressure he felt when he returned to school started building up. “I felt like I wasn’t strong, like I was a failure,” he told me, “and because of that I lost a lot of self-esteem.” His mind felt scattered and unable to focus. More and more work accumulated.
Michael came home from school one day and went straight to his room. He didn’t leave all evening. He didn’t sleep all night. Emotions flowed out of him as he yelled at himself, cried, and realized he’d been holding back his feelings for years.
“After that,” he said, “I knew I had to change something.”
FURTHER READING
As well as being a middle school counsellor, Phyllis Fagell is a writer and columnist in The Washington Post. Check out her blog and follow her on Facebook or Twitter.
You can support Damion Cooper’s program for boys and young men in Baltimore on the Project Pneuma website. If you want to learn more about the statistics I cited in the episode, visit The Baltimore Sun’s Baltimore Homicides webpage.
SOURCES
William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood →
Niobe Way and Jessica Cressen, ‘It Might Be Nice to Be a Girl...Then You Wouldn’t Have to Be Emotionless:’ Boys’ Resistance to Norms of Masculinity During Adolescence →
Andrew Reiner, Boy Talk: Breaking Masculine Stereotypes →
Wide Angle Youth Productions, Project Pneuma →
Luke Broadwater, From anger to forgiveness: How one man’s shooting led to a new program for Baltimore boys →
CONNECT
Breaking the Boy Code is part of the NGM Podcast Network. Next Gen Men is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging boys and men in the movement for gender justice. Learn more about our efforts and how you can support us at nextgenmen.ca. Reach out at [email protected] or on social media.
@boypodcast on Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo
@nextgenmen on Instagram and LinkedIn
Stress wound its way into Michael’s life throughout his preteen years, growing in size until it overwhelmed him in his first year of high school. “It took over my life,” he told me. “I’d come home and do four hours of homework. This took a toll on my social life, and my physical health. I began to develop an eating disorder, which I still have to battle to this day. I lost a lot of weight. I became more of an unhappy person. I wasn’t fun to be around. I didn’t enjoy being around other people. I just felt like my life was a mess.”
“It was painful, to see my life almost crumbling. Because of schoolwork, or my friends, or just something that was stressing me out so much I couldn’t be who I wanted to be. It was really just—it’s painful to think about now, it was painful to go through then. I’m still going through it.”
Things came to a head when Michael broke his leg and missed several weeks of school. He did his best to keep up with schoolwork in his absence, but the pressure he felt when he returned to school started building up. “I felt like I wasn’t strong, like I was a failure,” he told me, “and because of that I lost a lot of self-esteem.” His mind felt scattered and unable to focus. More and more work accumulated.
Michael came home from school one day and went straight to his room. He didn’t leave all evening. He didn’t sleep all night. Emotions flowed out of him as he yelled at himself, cried, and realized he’d been holding back his feelings for years.
“After that,” he said, “I knew I had to change something.”
FURTHER READING
As well as being a middle school counsellor, Phyllis Fagell is a writer and columnist in The Washington Post. Check out her blog and follow her on Facebook or Twitter.
You can support Damion Cooper’s program for boys and young men in Baltimore on the Project Pneuma website. If you want to learn more about the statistics I cited in the episode, visit The Baltimore Sun’s Baltimore Homicides webpage.
SOURCES
William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood →
Niobe Way and Jessica Cressen, ‘It Might Be Nice to Be a Girl...Then You Wouldn’t Have to Be Emotionless:’ Boys’ Resistance to Norms of Masculinity During Adolescence →
Andrew Reiner, Boy Talk: Breaking Masculine Stereotypes →
Wide Angle Youth Productions, Project Pneuma →
Luke Broadwater, From anger to forgiveness: How one man’s shooting led to a new program for Baltimore boys →
CONNECT
Breaking the Boy Code is part of the NGM Podcast Network. Next Gen Men is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging boys and men in the movement for gender justice. Learn more about our efforts and how you can support us at nextgenmen.ca. Reach out at [email protected] or on social media.
@boypodcast on Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo
@nextgenmen on Instagram and LinkedIn
Previous Episode
I Miss Him So Much: Boys and Friendship
Sebastian’s voice is captivating because its weight shifts dramatically. For part of his story, he maintains a sort of matter-of-fact nonchalance. “Yeah,” he starts out, “I had a very close friend, and we had been friends for like, our whole lives.” This lightness follows his memories of their earliest times together, how they grew closer and closer until they became inseparable.
After about ten minutes, however, Sebastian begins describing the crisis point where things between them changed. His voice catches as he says, “I went to the court, and it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.” His voice breaks. “I knew that wasn’t him.”
Then, with wet eyelashes, he shares his emotions. The loss. The loneliness. The yearning. His voice still flits back and forth, but it becomes heavier.
He was like one of those necklaces that are engraved with ‘best friend’ and marketed at preteen girls, where each pendant on its own is just an incomplete phrase and a broken heart.
It’s a fitting comparison. Primarily because it really does do justice to Sebastian’s feelings, but also because it illuminates the gender bias within our cultural expectations about friendship. There are no ‘best friend’ necklaces for teenage boys. We don’t have conversations with them about platonic trust and intimacy. We don’t help them resist the ways that homophobia limits their relationships. We don’t support them in maintaining those relationships through their adolescence.
We don’t expect boys to have emotionally intimate male friendships. Boys have them anyway.
SOURCES
William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood →
Niobe Way, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection →
CONNECT
Breaking the Boy Code is part of the NGM Podcast Network. Next Gen Men is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging boys and men in the movement for gender justice. Learn more about our efforts and how you can support us at nextgenmen.ca. Reach out at [email protected] or on social media.
@boypodcast on Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo
@nextgenmen on Instagram and LinkedIn
Next Episode
In That Moment You’re Scared: Boys and Hazing
Chad’s first experience with hazing was on his first night back at summer camp. Older boys grabbed him and his friends and told them to strip to their underwear. He tried to refuse but had to fight his way out of their grip, then left the cabin to the sound of the senior campers yelling, “Don’t be like him!”
Chad told a counsellor what had happened, but it wasn’t easy. “You don’t want to be a snitch,” he said on the podcast. “What’s holding you back is fear.” The risk of angering older peers in the moment and being ostracized from the group afterwards makes boys hesitate to speak out, and then the pressure to fit into a narrative of dominance and invulnerability compels them to bury their feelings deep inside.
If incidents of hazing could be said to have one thing in common, it’s silence. More than half of all boys experience hazing before they leave high school, but according to research, 92% of students will not report any kind of hazing to an adult. To put it bluntly, boys aren’t talking about hazing—at least not with experienced role models and mentors who could help them end ongoing cycles of violence.
It’s time we changed that.
FURTHER READING
Clementine Ford recently published Boys Will Be Boys and is a bit of a firebrand on Twitter or Instagram. You can support her work on Patreon.
Visit Werklund School’s Masculinities Studies webpage to learn more about Michael Kehler’s work and feminism-based gender research in Canada.
SOURCES
Clementine Ford, Macho ‘pranks’ and the devastating cost of male emotional repression →
Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys →
Phil Christman, What Is It Like to Be a Man? →
Cavetown, Boys Will Be Bugs →
CONNECT
Breaking the Boy Code is part of the NGM Podcast Network. Next Gen Men is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging boys and men in the movement for gender justice. Learn more about our efforts and how you can support us at nextgenmen.ca. Reach out at [email protected] or on social media.
@boypodcast on Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo
@nextgenmen on Instagram and LinkedIn
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