Jake Sawyer, TIWP Teacher

I’m not angry anymore. It feels like a waste of energy to be angry. But I do have an unfamiliar feeling inside. One I can’t quite explain…. like there’s a bundle of worms in my gut, tangled in a knot so intense that no amount of wriggling can free them, forcing me to look inward to free them on my own. Worms are misunderstood. They’re perceived as gross, when, in fact, they have five hearts. 

With each worm untangled, hearts are set free. And I come closer to understanding why the task of freeing them became my top priority today. Introspection. The freeing of the worms has reminded me I am capable of leading with love and positivity in a time when darkness seems to have blotted out the light. 

The worms in my stomach have me unsettled by the fact that the vast majority of people in this country can so blatantly ignore the need for a good person to be our leader.

It’s as simple as a battle of good and evil. As a whole, we’ve let evil win. Our devolution as a society in the next few years presents only one logical path I see forward for myself. I have to teach. 

The twisted definition of what it means to be ‘a man’ has deviated so far from the foundational qualities of being a human being. I see it as an epidemic. Men have deep-seeded mental health issues. We don’t talk about our emotions. And it leads to violence, misjudgement, narcissism, anger… because we don’t understand ourselves. Even worse, any attempt to understand ourselves is societally defined as weakness. 

I am an emotionally intelligent man. It’s taken a lot of work, but I take pride in saying it confidently. I lead with my heart, oftentimes forgetting to let my head follow (Trust me… I’m working on it). But my heart and head have sent me hurling toward a goal of helping young men explore their identity in the context of individualism, self-awareness, and self-expression rather than trying to suppress these things to fit in the undersized box society has built for them. 

In order to inspire change, we must create. Through creativity, the scabs of past emotional wounds will begin to fall from the skin, revealing the new life that was beneath them all along. 

To create, I write. I do so as a way to affect change at my core and constantly challenge the impositions placed upon me by surrounding influences. It’s worked for me. And so WE must write. 

We need a handhold for the young men who are grasping to find a way out of their box. We must explore our perceived limitations before we can find our way beyond them. Words, having the capability to inflict heinous depths of heartache, are also the only remedy for such pain. And so I write. And so WE write. 

The only way into yourself is outward expression. Men have been robbed of this possibility for centuries. 

“Rub some dirt on it. No crying. Be a man. Grow a pair. Tough it out. Keep it to yourself.” 

It’s time to flip this mentality on its head. We have a responsibility to the young men of future generations to inspire them to cry without shame. To build a sense of self that can be shared with confidence. To explore the power of emotion. To let it out. To open old wounds that never properly healed and stitch them up with new, more durable thread. And so we write. 

In a world that has shamed men for emotional exertion of any kind for far too long, we need an outlet. A place to put the pain and anger. A place to make sense of complex battles of ego, love, and fear. It will do us no good to maintain our white-knuckle grip on the things that scare us. And so we write.

In order to heal we must stop pointing fingers. We have to stop dividing ourselves into narrow-minded cliques and begin to address the root causes of our divisiveness. We have to explore ourselves through new lenses, defogging as we go. We have to acknowledge that we are more powerful when we are emotionally intelligent. We are stronger when we redefine strength by our own standards, not what is preached to us from a young age. We have to understand that to be a man is to be human, and that any emotions that come with being human are pillars of the strength we have the privilege of building within ourselves. We have to see others and remember that strength takes an infinite number of forms. 

There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to being a person, to being a man, to being wholly oneself. There is only a choice. A choice to either operate from the inside out, or the outside in. The choice is yours. I hope you make the right one. 

And so we write.