(See the bottom of this post for the Video version of Chapter 11)
I’ll be honest: I don’t fully know what the f*** these words mean.
Masculine. Feminine. Polarity.
People throw them around like they’re obvious, like we all agreed on the definitions. But I’m still wrestling with them. I’m still feeling around in the dark. I’ve had moments where I could feel polarity in the room, clear as day, but if you asked me to define it in a neat little sentence, I’d struggle.
So this chapter isn’t me pretending to be the expert.
This is me wandering through the mystery out loud.
I grew up Catholic. Forced church. Catholic school. Male priests. Altar boys, not altar girls. At home, my brother and I did the outside work—mowing, digging post holes, lifting heavy sh*t. My sister worked inside. At the family business, I was doing hard physical labor, hauling sides of beef, making deliveries, doing the rough stuff.
So from early on, I got the message:
Men do this.
Women do that.
Then I went to Fiji and saw a similar thing in a traditional village. Women cooking. Men fishing, building, working outside. Clear roles. Clear structure.
And I started wondering: did that clarity help?
In traditional cultures, marriage wasn’t this fragile little thing where people were constantly threatening to leave. You got married, and that was your life. So I wonder: did the roles help keep the ship steady?
Because in our modern culture, what the f*** is a man even supposed to do?
Make money?
Is that it?
Is masculinity now just “go make a bunch of money, even if the job destroys your soul”?
That’s where I get stuck.
Because I can feel this ancient part of me that would know exactly what to do in a village. Drop me into a tribe, tell me to hunt, build, protect, provide, help the people, and I’m good. I know how to do that.
But modern life?
Go sell poison. Go push propaganda. Go sit in unnatural lights doing sh*t I hate so I can make enough money to be considered attractive?
That doesn’t feel like manhood to me.
That feels like selling my soul...
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It’s a vessel my partner and I get into together, with the intention of traveling through life in it. But the ship is given to us empty. The only things inside it are what we put there.
So I can’t expect to take from the relationship what I haven’t put into it.
In my first marriage, we got into that ship with no manual. No sailing instructions. No maintenance guide. No tools. No skills. No lighthouse. No foghorn. Nothing.
Just two young people sent out into the ocean with fifty-foot seas and told, “Good luck.”
Of course we crashed.
How could we not?
That’s why relationship skills matter.
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(See the bottom of this post for the Video version of Chapter 8)
If someone does something that would normally be called abusive, but I don’t experience it as abuse—if it doesn’t land that way in my body, if it doesn’t take something from me, if it has no harmful effect—then that matters.
So when I try to define abuse, I start with impact.
People behave badly all the time. Sometimes it’s clearly abuse. Sometimes everyone agrees. Sometimes even the person doing it would admit it.
But for me, the first and most reliable indicator is...
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(See the bottom of this post for the Video version of Chapter 7)
This chapter is about questioning what we’re told is certain.
Not from a place of rebellion for the sake of rebellion—but from observing cracks in systems that are presented as flawless.
When “Foolproof” Fails
There’s a case that should make anyone pause...a parent applied for public assistance and was required to take a DNA test. The results came back saying their children were not theirs...and then they were accused of fraud...
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(See the bottom of this post for the Video version of Chapter 6)
This chapter is going to challenge a lot of what people believe.
I’m not asking you to blindly agree with me. I’m asking you to look for yourself.
There are many examples throughout history where symptoms were real—but the explanation was wrong. Scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, Minamata… all cases where people blamed the wrong cause before eventually discovering something entirely different.
Symptoms are real.
But the story about what causes them? That’s where I began to question everything...
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Chapter 14 — Getting Back Out There
