May
14
“You’re too ashamed and simultaneously too proud to ask for help. Asking for help means you aren’t “manning up” like everything in culture silently tells you to do. And so everything that isn’t addressed becomes that dark beast inside you, lurking at the edges. You become so out of touch with your emotions it’s a surprise when you’re actually happy, like it’s an accident. A childish glee of a once happy childhood being crushed by your everyday repressed identity. You lose all sense of proportion. Drugs, alcohol, depression, fighting and other self-destructive behavior show up. At least self-erasure makes sense, at least you can control the rate of your descent. A joyous self-annihilation, like watching your own car crash in slow motion from far away, simultaneously inside the car and outside it. A symbolic interpretation of reality. This is in fact your true position in all this, your emotional self is a 1000 miles away observing this scene with equanimity, your actual self speeding into a brick wall.”
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskMen/comments/14ot1r/what_societal_pressures_are_there_on_men_to_man_up/c7f1p04
