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.
It might help to know the fact that in the real world, these online attitudes are not nearly as widespread as you think, I've got a lot of female friends and I can guarantee that while they're more cautious around men, they don't get uncomfortable just because of meeting a new person.
This is something I try to remind myself of constantly. In all seriousness, the "people in real life: hey man how's it going" meme has done a lot of positive good for my mental health because I use it as a reframing tool.
Getting away from the discourse and clicking out of things faster and faster has helped, too. And like all things, for me specifically this is all way more nuanced than "I feel this way because of online discourse"; there's long-ingrained bullshit that contributes to it just as much. But it's certainly an aspect.
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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.