When it comes to New Year’s Resolutions, my initial thought is always, “If I knew there was something I needed to change about my habits or behavior, I wouldn’t wait until the New Year. I would make the change immediately!”
Yet still, I figured for 2025, I could at least have an answer ready to contribute and seem like a normal human being. One of the suggestions I have continued reading and hearing is that, as a man, I need to “be more vulnerable and more in touch with my emotions”. So I figured that by default, that would become my (joke of a) New Year’s Resolution.
The thing is, aren’t I fairly “vulnerable” as it is? I’ve been documenting my life here on my blog since 2009. I feel that I do a decent job of sharing the highlights as well as the struggles I have overcome throughout each phase in my life.
But the part about getting in touch with my emotions… well, it immediately became confusing to me. Only two emotions came to mind, regarding what I actually feel on a daily or weekly basis: Joy and anger.
Those two have seemingly gotten me through my adult life just fine… right? I’m just being “emotional efficient”… right?
Even going back a decade on my YouTube channel, I see that even the silly fictional characters I created for myself were running on nothing but joy and anger:
“Green Meanie”, the antagonist from my Jack-Man superhero series; and “Naughty Nick”, who regularly found himself initiating street fights with strangers.
I had to do a Google search: “What are the emotions?”
The only other ones that I connected with were passion and creativity, which I found on the most amazing emotions chart I have ever seen, on Abby Vanmuijen’s website.
She has a category called “Genius” that I immediately respected; which interestingly enough, is found sandwiched between the categories of “Joy” and “Anger”.
I felt a sense of accomplishment. It was confirmed that I most certainly am driven on a daily basis by the emotional categories of joy and anger; as well as genius; specifically, being passionate and creative.
But that only accounted for half of the emotions wheel. As I read through all the emotions on the other half, I instinctively felt rage inside of me; as if I was about to physically fight someone.
I was undeniably triggered by simply the sight of the very words found in the categories of sadness, fear, and disgust. My subconscious clearly felt “attacked” by even just the thought of ever attempting to connect with these ideas:
Overwhelmed, anxious, heartbroken, lonely, jealous, self-conscious- and yes, vulnerable.
Here is apparently the discovery: I refuse to associate with any word I deem as “weak”. I have formed my identity around being strong and capable; not just physically, but mentally- and therefore, emotionally.
This is how I am intrinsically wired; even if it’s not a sustainable functional model for most human beings on the planet. Imagine having no sense of smell. Well, that’s sort of like how it is for me; except basically I have no conscious access to the vulnerable emotions in the categories of sadness, fear, and disgust.
Recently, I proclaimed that I win the award for the “Least Emotional” person in my house. Based on my discovery about only “allowing” half of the existing emotions, that seems like a fair assessment.
It is my observation that for other men who are like me, having extremely limited access to the vulnerable emotions, they choose to seek access to experiencing sadness, fear, and disgust by watching sports; specifically when their team isn’t doing well. This escalates around the time of the Super Bowl and March Madness.
Just today on the radio at the gym, I heard the classic Hootie & the Blowfish song, “Only Wanna Be with You,”… as Darius Rucker proclaims, “I’m such a baby ’cause the Dolphins make me cry.”
As for me, I’ve openly never been a sports guy. However, I recently realized that a major motivation to regularly write new songs is because it reveals what emotions I am experiencing on a hidden level.
For example, the opening line of the first song I have recorded this year for my YouTube channel is this: “Feels like a former life I still have memories from, but I’m not done – Where did everyone go? Divinely disconnected, I can’t be the only one, missing out on something – Where did everyone go?”
This is the emotion of sadness. The very first phrase of the very first song I shared with the world this year so far… began with the phrase “feels like”. I wrote that song last summer when I left Tennessee and rebooted my life here in Alabama. Apparently, during that time, I was experiencing some sadness but didn’t realize it.
But beyond the songs I write, I pretty much never even hint at being sad or fearful or any emotion I feel would link me to identifying with “weakness” in my end.
So that is my synopsis. Am I on to something here?
What I don’t know yet is if as a man, I am a bit of an extreme exception…
Or if indeed most men avoid the emotional categories of disgust, fear, and sadness in an effort to maintain a mindset and reputation of being strong and in control… while most women need to have access to all of the emotions in order to feel human?
I mean, after God created Adam, He immediately acknowledged, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
Perhaps one of the ways women help men is by giving them access, even if indirectly, to a much wider array of emotions to balance out the men’s tendency to depend so heavily on logic.
So yeah… there’s some supreme irony in regards to my joke of a New Year’s Resolution about becoming more vulnerable and more in touch with my emotions.
The joke was on me: As I successfully began achieving my goal, I discovered something sobering, confusing, and relieving:
I have lived my entire life trying to “just be myself”, while never truly understanding the actual “self” buried deep in layers of attempts to be anyone except my actual self. Until this year.
To be continued…click here to read the other half.
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