DAY 13: The Everyday pt.1:

In these posts about mens mental health I often mention the word ‘everyday’ and there is a reason for this. I touched on it earlier in Movember; our patterns of behaviour may not seem that destructive or limiting because we are decent folk but if we do or say something that we feel awkward about this often leads to rationalising it. A way to make ourselves feel okay about what happened. It’s normal, we do this everyday. But if this process leads to us not dealing with the feelings it generates, ruts in the road begin to form and these can grow in to patterns of behaviour that last a lifetime unless we address them. Often this is simply a case of talking to someone about our feelings. Only problem is that us men aren’t always great at talking about ‘feelings’.

It’s often not until later in our mid-life period that we see the effects of our emotional repression, when the ruts in the road are deep and sticking our head out to look at what other options are available to us seems scary. We want to put our heads back down in the ditch where it’s comfortable. Pretend that we didn’t see it. We’re okay just as we are, we’re not a bad person….and so on. But we don’t feel good, we should be able to feel good and happy about who we are and if we don’t like ourselves then we need to create a new version. For many of us men, this starts with talking about our feelings.