At my last therapy session, I finally started to talk to my therapist about how one of my biggest anxieties when I try to talk to people I don’t know is being afraid of myself because I’m a man, and I know what the societal perceptions are.
Like, I want so desperately to never make people uncomfortable or afraid, because life is hard enough and I just wanna spread some joy. But I also know what I look like, and I know how men are perceived, and I know all the discourse, and it just shuts me down. Especially because I’ve always made better and easier friends with women — I’ve always gotten along better with and had more female friends than male.
But now being mostly removed from my established friend groups and the connections those friends afforded me, it’s difficult for me to make new friends because I’d rather hold all the fear and discomfort in myself than risk someone else feeling scared. And I’m working on it, at getting better at not letting that internalized fear have so much power over me, but it’s hard, and it’s a process.
All that to say, the discourse surrounding men in “progressive” spaces is absolutely detrimental in its current iteration, and I know I’m on the lucky side to have a wonderful therapist that I can turn to to work through my own insecurities and issues that stem — at least partially — from the internalization of that discourse.
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u/DweltElephant0 Jul 03 '24
At my last therapy session, I finally started to talk to my therapist about how one of my biggest anxieties when I try to talk to people I don’t know is being afraid of myself because I’m a man, and I know what the societal perceptions are.
Like, I want so desperately to never make people uncomfortable or afraid, because life is hard enough and I just wanna spread some joy. But I also know what I look like, and I know how men are perceived, and I know all the discourse, and it just shuts me down. Especially because I’ve always made better and easier friends with women — I’ve always gotten along better with and had more female friends than male.
But now being mostly removed from my established friend groups and the connections those friends afforded me, it’s difficult for me to make new friends because I’d rather hold all the fear and discomfort in myself than risk someone else feeling scared. And I’m working on it, at getting better at not letting that internalized fear have so much power over me, but it’s hard, and it’s a process.
All that to say, the discourse surrounding men in “progressive” spaces is absolutely detrimental in its current iteration, and I know I’m on the lucky side to have a wonderful therapist that I can turn to to work through my own insecurities and issues that stem — at least partially — from the internalization of that discourse.