Month: November 2025

Spirituality

Home Runs.

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I played multiple sports as a kid.

I played multiple sports really badly.

I was terrible at baseball. But I was our number one batter.

I had an unwavering belief in my ability to absolutely 10000% just swing for the fucking fences. And I usually did. If I didn’t, I would knock myself over from the sheer force of trying.

I think this is one of my favorite qualities about myself.

I have said before, what is true in the physical is true in the spiritual.

I can’t catch to save my life, I am kid in the sandlot levels of bad. Catching a ball takes a second, it’s unpredictable. You have to be able to map it out and make a calculated decision. I, am indeed, better off standing there like a dork with my glove in the air. I overthink it, I panic and I choke.

But if something is coming right at me and all I have to do is hit it as hard as I physically can? MVP, baby!

Ya’ll wonder why I like a good metaphor so much? It’s because they’re god damn enlightening, that’s why.

I have talked a lot on this blog about the work I have consciously and meticulously done to get through the hardest times in my life. I haven’t talked much about how strongly I have followed my intuition when it really, really mattered.

I knew I was supposed to move out west for over a year before I did. I would think on it, I would try to figure out where, I would price out moving companies. Every time I would get overwhelmed and I would ask myself how the fuck I thought I could ever actually make that happen.

I would stand there with my hand in the air hoping somehow it would fall right in. I guess you could say it did. That is one way of looking at it.

I can distinctly remember three moments in my life where I felt like the word ‘Go!’ was yelled at me and my entire life path changed course in a split second. Mentally, first and then very quickly after in my reality.

These moments led me to opening my own business, moving in with Perfect on Paper Guy and leaving on May 4th to drive out west.

I do not, in any single way, regret those decisions. They were the most instinctual decisions I have ever made. They were the exact right thing to do.

It’s funny actually, the snap decisions you think I wouldn’t regret, the ones I have made out of of fear and not my instincts, are often the ones I actually do.

Some things end. Businesses have shitty landlords and then you have to close. But I was so unbelievably successful, then and after. It blows my mind sometimes if I actually look back and think about it. It was incredible, I am so fucking proud of myself for it. It’s probably what most people would look over my life and label my #1 achievement.

Relationships end too. Relationships have things happen in them that are so fucking dark you can’t even imagine what your life would look like if they hadn’t happened. There is no reason I can possibly think of why we should have had to lose our child. I really can’t. But I will, never, ever regret meeting him or jumping when I heard the word ‘Go!’. It changed the entire course of my life, I am a completely different person.

I could look at these two examples and think that they are prime examples of how much I should not trust my intuition, look at how much heartbreak they led to! But I don’t see it that way.

When I moved in with Perfect on Paper Guy the second time, right before I ended up moving out west, I had the same instinctual feeling. The only time I doubted it, I asked to find a four leaf clover. Something I had looked for many times and had never found. I found one.

This could definitely be seen as ‘Do not, under any circumstances, trust your intuition.’ But again, I don’t see it that way.

It set me up in the wildest and most perfect way to move out west.

I’m sure there is something that will happen one day that will make me want to cry and say, ‘I wish I would have never moved to the fucking desert!’ just like I know I have with the other two in the worst moments. It’s natural when shit hits the fan.

But I will never regret it.

Right before these moments, I couldn’t imagine how I could get past where I was at that time. It felt like I was fumbling around in the dark trying to find my way somewhere.

Until the lights snapped on and I swung for the fucking fences.

I opened a business in three months. The physical labor of the build out was done in less than three weeks.

I started packing to move in with Perfect on Paper Guy the night we got back from Joshua Tree.

We made the decision for me to move back in and I signed out of my lease the next day. I started moving in that week. This was April 23rd.

The event that led me to snap was on May 4th and started driving with zero idea where I was going. On May 9th, I figured it out and signed my lease. I got back to Indiana on the 11th and I was in my new desert home by May 22nd.

It took me 19 days to move out west.

Something big is coming, I can feel it in my bones. It’s a deep seated adrenaline that’s starting to boil up in my soul.

Feeling it now, I realize that I had this for a month or so before I got pregnant as well. It went away when I saw those two lines. I knew something big was coming and it did. I had already swung.

I know something is coming and I’m spinning my wheels trying to figure out what the fuck it could possibly be.

The ideas I have seem outlandish.

But then again, they always did.

Something is coming, I’m poised and ready.

I’m not looking for the ball, I’m looking at the fucking fences. I know when to swing.

And, baby, it’s always a home run.

Self Reflection

Wasting Time.

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I think about the future a lot.

By that I mean, I try not to think about the future a lot.

By that I mean, if I think about the future too much I spiral out into an existential crisis.

People like to ask you about your future. What are your goals? Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What are you doing this weekend?

My answer to these questions is usually, ‘I don’t know, whatever I feel like doing.’

I wish I was saying this because I am a totally free spirit who only lives in the present moment but I’m not. I’m scared to think I know what my future holds. If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that if you think you know what the future holds, you’re probably dead wrong.

So now I am afraid to know but I’m also afraid of not knowing. And I have absolutely no idea how to answer any of those questions.

I feel like I am in limbo. I don’t move forward or backward. I’m stuck.

I take the exact same road to get pretty much anywhere I need to go. I am usually focused on the road in front of me as I am a diligent and responsible driver.

There are mountains in every direction and on all sides of me. There are rolling hills, plateaus, giant crests in the distance. I see them everyday, they have blended into the overall landscape of my route to work.

Straight in front of me there is a massive mountain, like behemoth sized. It’s usually a giant grey geometric shape outlined on the horizon, it’s easy to forget it’s even there.

The other day I was driving to work and the sun hit in a way it hadn’t before and it was like I had never actually seen it before. It had always been right in front of me but that day, it was magic. It fucking ruled.

I sit in the exact same spot to see the stars a couple nights a week. Mainly because it’s spooky out here in the dark and it has the clearest view while also being close to my gate.

The Leonid meteor shower was last night so I went out to try and catch it before I went to bed. From my vantage point, I was looking up at Cassiopeia. When I went back out in the early morning, I was looking up at Gemini.

It wasn’t even a twelve hour difference.

I have a fun activity I do called ‘sun chasing’. This is where I go on all sides of the property, walk at different elevations and sit on different points of the fences to get the best view of the sunset or sunrise.

It’s a different spot every day. It’s also a different sky every day.

I have sat on those same fences while I waited for storms to roll in. I watched as the clouds moved in different directions, I felt the subtle shifts of the wind as it picked up strands of my hair. I tracked the first few raindrops in the distance to the downpour that came soon after.

I moved when I realized a metal fence wasn’t the smartest place to be sitting during a thunderstorm.

After a day and a half of rain, I watched teeny tiny little blades of grass grow up out of a bunch of old, dusty dirt. I wondered how long they had been sitting dormant, just waiting for the right opportunity.

They died, obviously, this is the desert, but that isn’t the point.

This time period of my life feels like I am standing still. It’s hard to track the passage of time here, there’s no seasons. I didn’t realize it was Halloween until I saw pictures of people carving pumpkins back home. I feel like life is moving forward everywhere else while I am floating along in an eternal summer.

Which isn’t the worst when it comes to hypothetical purgatories.

The days keep passing, they turn into months. I feel like I am wasting time. Like I need to be doing something. Getting out there and meeting someone so I could maybe get married and have a chance at having a baby before I turn 35. Or investing in this blog so it can be something more than a webpage I use to send my thoughts out into the ether. Or trying to learn enough about one thing enough to do something different with my career.

I could observe all of these things and conclude that I am stuck, I am standing in the same place while the world rotates and changes around me. Which would be a shitty metaphor and an even dumber science experiment.

I don’t know why I get all worked up about it. I don’t even know if I really want those things. If I did, I’d probably do something about it outside of randomly panicking about it every few days.

I’m not doing those things.

I’m watching storms roll in. I’m watching the sun rise and set. I am tracking the patterns the moon moves in as those days turn into months. I am watching as grass puts in a real valiant effort to grow out in the desert. I am watching as it dies too.

You don’t learn how to do all of these things without standing in the same place for awhile and letting the world move around you. So I guess it’s not a shitty metaphor at all.

Honestly, I guess most of the time I am just hanging out and doing whatever I feel like doing. And then I sit and listen to music while I write about it and send it off into the ether. Or I sit and write unhinged things I will never, ever send into the ether.

Oh, and I’m alive and actually living. I’m not grass in the desert. I don’t know what I am but I’m not that.

I take that back, I guess I am sitting dormant and waiting for that perfect opportunity to present itself so that’s not really a shitty metaphor either. I’m just not going to give it a solid effort only to watch myself die anymore.

When it comes to the future, I think I should just chill out. I think if I allow myself to move with the rotation of the earth, if I don’t try to cling to an idea, a space or a time, it’ll take me where I need to go.

Resisting it would literally be pointless anyway. I don’t control the damn earth.

I don’t know why I’m so worried about the future anyway.

I think one day I will be bopping along, the sun will hit something completely different and I’ll say ‘Oh! That’s exactly what I was looking for!’

The sky is different every single day. I don’t need to know what it will look like tomorrow, next week, or next year.

Thankfully, I have all this time to wait and see. Who knows, it might even rain.

Then it will be this grass’s time to shine, baby!

Spirituality

Flies.

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After my morning dream journal and reflections, I went to sit outside. I have been doing this every morning but I am usually out before sunrise. It’s Sunday so I slept in and went out around nine.

It felt nice, the sun was warm on my skin and I was still sleepy so I enjoyed lazing around in it.

But then the fucking flies started to swarm. I prayed for them to go away so I could enjoy my morning. They kept coming, I kept swatting. But I didn’t want to go inside, god damnet.

So I just sat still. I was uncomfortable. I worried about the health dangers of flies landing on you.

I kept sitting still until I could focus on something else.

There were a lot of butterflies out today, a large monarch as well as many small ones. I watched as they danced around each other.

Palo verde trees are plentiful in my yard. They are inspiring in the way they grow, gnarled and spiked. They twist and turn up to the sun and they provide coverage to the baby saguaros until they grow even taller than they are. But they still affectionately hold them close.

Their bark is green, an evolutionarily trait they adapted to be able to produce the life giving chlorophyll they need to survive. The leaves they do have are very tiny, you can’t see them unless you are close. Leaves let too much moisture out and in the desert, moisture is scarce. You have to keep what you can. So instead, they grew to be tall and green.

Everything is green in the desert. People say it’s not green but it is.

The flies continued to swarm.

They remind me of what I have been thinking on recently, how evil whispers. How it badgers you relentlessly, only coming back stronger if you try to swat it away. It whispers until it’s screaming. It whispers until it’s drowning you, until it’s all you can hear.

The worst things seem to try and demand the most of my attention. It may just be a buzzing in my ear. But it distracts me the most from my purpose.

There was a period of time that I didn’t go outside after the sun rose because all I could focus on were the fucking flies.

My purpose is to stay present, despite the flies.

My purpose is to stay present with the flies.

They will always be there when the sun is shining. I can let them ruin my morning or I can choose to accept them as an inevitable part of the balance in life and enjoy myself anyway.

I enjoy looking at the butterflies and the Palo verde trees, protecting their little baby saguaros.

I wondered why the butterflies couldn’t be the ones swarming me instead. That would be much easier.

I guess that’s just how it is.

Good whispers too. It just doesn’t come back stronger if you swat it away. It’s polite. I wish it wasn’t.

Eventually, I did go inside. It got to be too much. But I had done what I came to do, I stayed in the sun.

I accepted the flies until, for a moment, they became nothing but background noise.

Then I took a shower to wash off the feeling of them. Purposeful, but still gross.

I think I learned a lesson. I also think that next time I sit outside in the daytime, I will wear pants instead of shorts.

Practical and spiritual, there is usually more than one lesson to learn.

Heartbreak & Loss

The Choices We Make.

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I fell asleep outside last night. I am someone who falls asleep outside now.

Not for very long though. I was looking at the stars, sitting in a reclining chair at the bottom of one of the small dips in my yard. The sun had barely set but it’s dark out here, they pop up quickly. It’s like your own personal planetarium.

Sometimes when I see something so beautiful that I can’t even believe it’s real, I have this twinge of sadness. I usually ignore it and hope that one day it goes away.

When I woke up outside, I had that same twinge but it brought with it the memory of the last time I could see so many stars, the last time I fell asleep under them.

We were in Joshua Tree. 

The first time I saw the desert was on the back of a motorcycle, riding from Prescott to California. We spent time with my Mamaw in Santa Monica. We saw Tyler Childers in Inglewood. We spent three days in Joshua Tree at the end. 

When we were in Santa Monica, I thought back to the last time I was there. I wrote about it, even. It was when I was looking at the ocean and thought about how nice it would be to walk in and let the waves take me. I was, obviously, so fucking miserable at that time in my life.

When we rode by, when we went to that same beach, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to see it all again from these eyes. It was so healing that it was borderline overwhelming. 

We went to the national park. I had seen the desert landscape from the back of the bike but seeing it up close was something else. It was just so fucking funny. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at anything in the desert up close but I would absolutely recommend it. I couldn’t stop pointing at things, dying laughing and saying, “What is that? What is this? Look at that guy!”

I hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in months. But I couldn’t stop. In between my gales of laughter, he told me the names of the plants and animals. He showed me how to climb up a rock face and he scaled up a tower of them. I was too nervous to try after I slipped at the bottom.

Later that night, we laughed even more. I laughed so hard that I couldn’t get any words out. Everything was just so fucking funny. 

That night was the first time I had ever really seen the stars. Laying on our backs, he pointed them all out to me, he told me their names and we counted the ones that shot by. He showed me how to identify satellites and planes by their lights. He showed me how a few stars can become a whole constellation.

It was the first moment, the first place, that I felt like everything could be okay again. 

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with nature. I had old science textbooks I would spend hours looking at, realistic stickers of bugs all over my desk. I lived in the city so I had a small backyard but I was always out there poking around and trying to identify the different bugs and animals. I collected worms and threw a fit when I had to wear a dress that couldn’t get covered in dirt. I was usually by myself but I was always on an adventure. 

The best times were with my Dad. He knew so much about the woods and he showed me it all. He knew how to bait the hook, where to cast and he knew how to follow the creek bed. If I was an adventurer, he was the tour guide. I was just happy to be traipsing around at my dad’s side in the underbrush. I liked to be taught things just as much as I loved learning them.

When I was in Joshua Tree, he knew everything about the desert. He knew his way around, it was all familiar to him. As he showed me all of it, I was just happy to be traipsing around at his side. I liked to be taught things just as much as I loved learning them. 

You can see the parallel I’m making here. I didn’t see it until I started typing it out, to be quite honest. 

I always loved to learn and adventure by myself. But it was my Dad who really knew how too. He was the one who paved the way, the one who knew where to go and how to do it. He was the brave one, I just tried to be.

One night, we were riding bikes. He was doing tricks and I followed him trying to do the same. It was fun until my tire hit the curb and I fell face first into the pavement, scraping off quite a bit of the left side of my face in the process. I cried until I went back to my mom’s house. Trying to follow in my Dad’s footsteps, trying to embody his fearlessness, ended in my own pain.

I feel like I can feel that scrape on my face. 

When I was looking up at the stars last night, I remembered being too nervous to follow my partner up the rocks in Joshua Tree. I thought about how I got bolder once we got home, following in his footsteps, climbing trees and sitting on our roof.

I forgot how pure I felt back then, how I felt like the best version of myself. Being with him, living in our house in the country and going on all of our adventures brought me back to that sense of childlike wonder. It brought me back to how it felt to be stomping around in creeks with my Dad, nothing to fear, as long as he led the way. It felt like coming home.

It felt like everything could be okay again. 

Until I fell off my bike. Until he tried to go out the same way my Dad did. Until all those same wounds got ripped right back open.

I spent a summer remembering how it felt to be walking in the sun, nothing to fear, with my Dad by my side.

Somehow, I had forgotten how the story ended.

It took a few years after my Dad’s suicide for me to really grasp the fact that he had died. I didn’t really understand the true pain it left me with until I almost experienced it again with my partner. I understood it even more when I found out I was pregnant a week later. Carrying my own child, I couldn’t escape the gravity of it. 

The summer didn’t last long. It was always brief back then too.

The winter my Dad died, I didn’t try to be brave. I didn’t think I could do it by myself. I was too afraid to do it without him showing me how. I let my face heal and then I packed up all of my adventures into a box and I put it away in a spot where I could act like it, and my Dad, had never existed.

This spring, I wanted us to move out west. I begged him. We were dying in Indiana, it was sucking the life out of us. I thought it was our only chance, the only way we could get ourselves out of the deep dark hole we had found ourselves in. I thought if we just moved, everything could be okay again.

I am embarrassed to say that I begged him to come with me even after everything blew up. 

But when it did, I had to make a choice. I knew after everything that happened, I couldn’t stay in Indiana. I couldn’t pack it all up in a box and pretend it never existed. 

So I didn’t.

I went to the first place I could remember feeling like everything would be okay, the first place I could see the stars. I went where he showed me.

I went out west.

This summer, I built the life I had begged for.

I was my own tour guide and my own adventurer. I kept climbing rocks after I slipped on them. I learned the names of all the plants and animals. I caught the scorpions in my house. I found my own place to sit and watch the stars. I cried when I scraped my knees, I cleaned my own wounds and I watched them as they healed.

I can tell you quite a bit about the desert. I can tell you when the prickly pears produce fruit, when the saguaros bloom. I can tell you which holes have tarantulas in them and which ones have kangaroo rats. I can tell you about how calcite comes up to the surface after it rains and why. I can tell you which feathers in my collection came from what bird, which shed came from what snake. 

I am walking in my own footsteps, paving my own way. I have become who that little girl, happy at her Dad’s side, always wanted to be. But this time, I’m the brave one, not just trying to be. It’s an inspiring story, of course, it’s my story and it is all true.

Sometimes it just feels like something is missing.

When I am traipsing around, there’s no one happy to be by my side. When I learn something new, there’s no one here to share it with. There’s no one here to laugh with when I say, “What is that? Look at that guy!” 

When I see something so beautiful that I can’t even believe it’s real, there’s no one here to look over and know they’re seeing it too. 

I built the life I begged for. I built the life I chose.

Being brave just doesn’t always feel the way you thought it would. 

Heartbreak & Loss

The Men We Weep For.

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When I was 9, I peeked around a wall and watched my Mamaw silently cry as she sat on the steps in her home. I stood, frozen, as I observed a mother’s quiet defeat from the addictions her son was wrestling with. Overwhelmed by her fears for him and her fears for me, she took a moment and she wept. 

When I was 16, I came home from school in a hurry to go somewhere I thought was really important. My mom followed me around the house trying to get me to stop, to listen. When I turned around, exasperated, she sat me down and told me my dad had died. He had committed suicide. In my room alone after the funeral, I wept. 

When I was 27, my brother, the son of my stepdad, died. Two days after his mother, both from a drug overdose. At the end of his funeral, my mom laid her head in my lap and wept. She wept for him and she wept for my stepfather, who couldn’t bring himself to face the day. 

When I was 28, I stood by my stepfather’s side as he took his last breath. Surrounded by his mother, my mother, my sisters and my aunts, his addiction defeated him once and for all. Collectively, we wept.

When I was 29, I experienced first hand how unresolved childhood and war trauma could manifest as violence, addiction and infidelity. Over and over again, I wept.

When I was 31, I almost lost my parter to suicide. After, I watched as he tried to advocate for himself only to be denied, cast off and failed over and over again by the system that was supposed to help him. I watched as he became a shell of himself. Still, I weep.

This could be seen as a collection of stories about the men who are selfish and undeserving of the women who love them so deeply. The women who begged and bargained with the universe, that did everything they could to save the men who didn’t or couldn’t save themselves. The women who left and came back, the ones you think should have had the backbone to walk away for good.

But it’s not. These women are strong, admirable women. They love deeply and unconditionally. I know because I am one.

This is about the men in my life I have watched dissolve into disease. The men whose light I’ve watched slowly fade from their eyes. The ones I’ve seen do horrible things that no one should be capable of. The men who drank themselves to death and the one’s who couldn’t find a reason to keep going.

This is about the moment I looked into my partners eyes and realized that I no longer recognized the man I loved.

All of the men in these stories were deeply affected by their childhood trauma, their mental health struggles and their addictions. They were ultimately defined by them. All of these men deserved better.

This is about our our fathers, our sons, partners and friends.

This is about how we talk about men.

When I scroll social media, I can see millions of posts, without even trying, about how beautiful and amazing I am for being a woman. I see post after post telling me how much I’m worth, how well I should be treated.

I also see millions of posts saying that degrading men as whole should be an acceptable part of my healing process. That I am better than men, I am worth more than men. I’ve even seen violence towards men portrayed a joke, going as far as saying they deserve it.

Can you imagine if you saw a post saying that degrading women is an acceptable part of a man’s healing process, that they were worth more than women? Joking that the women who hurt them deserve violence?

There are a lot of posts dedicated to the narratives of, “Men aren’t shit, men are worthless, men will never change.”

I haven’t seen many posts that focus on how much men deserve to know their worth, how they deserve to be treated, or how amazing they are. When I do, there are quite a few comments arguing that this isn’t true.

Positive posts about men are often geared towards finding the ‘one good one’ in the never ending sea of trash. A good man is seen as an exception to the rule.

Can you fucking imagine if thats what you saw all day?

How would you feel about your odds of being the one good one?

If you had made some bad choices in relationships in the past, would you think you could be any better? That you could become one of the good ones? Or would you feel you had lost your chance?

Why do we believe so deeply in our own inherent worth as women but men don’t deserve the same? Why do we think we can consistently grow and change but somehow men are unable to do the same?

I am well aware that a lot of the comments on these posts are about people’s individual experiences and I will never discount them. I will never say that someone shouldn’t have negative feelings towards the people who hurt them. I will never say someone say someone should have to stand by the side of someone who has treated them badly.

I have talked a lot about my experiences with men on this blog, I have talked about a lot of the men in those stories.

I’ve talked about how much I loved them. I have talked about how much I hated them.

I have made the mistake many times of having so much empathy for the men in my life that I sacrificed myself and my own well being in the process.

But I will never become so angry and short sighted by what I have experienced that I believe any man, even the ones I have wrote about, deserves to believe they are worthless. That they deserve to be defined solely by their past actions and cannot change. That they aren’t worth enough to try.

They are not worthless. They never will be.

The feelings we have are still valid. Our experiences will never be discounted. But I’m not talking about toxic relationships right now.

This is about the bigger picture.

This is about men’s individual experiences and feelings being valid too. This is about seeing them as people. This is about giving them the same space we do.

This is about how we talk about men.

Just like us, a lot of men have been hurt, they have been cheated on, they have been left. They have experienced being abused, humiliated, and frightened. I have seen that a lot of them are too embarrassed or ashamed to even admit it.

They’ve been conditioned to think it doesn’t matter. That if they do talk about it, their vulnerability could be equated to weakness. Some, even when they have tried, have been ridiculed or emasculated for it.

My entire blog is about my life experiences, relationships and hurts. I am honest about the mistakes I’ve made and how I have grown from them. I receive nothing but support and kindness.

How many men are writing blogs about their childhood wounds, their growth, and their toxic relationships? How many men are being vulnerable on the internet?

How many would feel like they were even allowed to?

Unprocessed trauma, from childhood or adulthood, often comes out in destructive ways. Anger, violence, infidelity, addiction. There are so many ways someone can hurt themselves and others when something lies under the surface unhealed and unacknowledged. This is not an excuse, it does not make these choices and reactions acceptable, it absolutely does not.

I have made these choices, I have wrote about them. If my blog was authored by a man, would it be taken seriously? Or would you condemn me and define me by my worst choices?

Would you think I couldn’t change?

When men have been hurt, they are often pressured to fight back, fuck off or forget about it. They’re not usually given the tools to actually deal with it, they’re expected to already know how. They’re expected to deal with it on their own. They’re not given a lot of sympathy.

Half the time, people don’t even believe they were actually hurt. I’ve even seen people say they deserved it.

If you thought your hurt didn’t matter, would you even be able to recognize it?

Would you even know what to do about it?

They’re not championed when they’re knocked down and get back up. They’re not usually told how proud someone is of them when they do.

They’re not really exalted for the changes they do make. It’s both expected and not expected of them. Really, it’s a lose, lose.

We seem to think that a man’s worth is defined strictly by what they do. Or what they don’t. Their worth is measured by what they can provide. It’s, honestly, usually tied to what we think of them and the quality of what we receive. It’s tied to what we think we deserve, not necessarily what they do.

Are they not inherently worthy for just being a human being? Could you look at your newborn son and think anything else?

At what age are they no longer allowed to cry? At what age do they no longer deserve respect, they no longer deserve anything, without earning it?

Their worth is not measured by what they can provide. Their worth is not measured by how we feel about them.

Noone ever deserves to feel like they are worthless.

In my career field, I talk to men every single day. The amount of times I have been told, ‘I have never shared this with someone before’ breaks my fucking heart.

Men deserve to feel that when they talk, someone will listen. They deserve to feel like they don’t always have to be the strongest person in the room. They deserve to know they matter. They deserve to feel cared for. They deserve to feel safe.

If men take the chance on opening up, they deserve the respect of actually being heard. If they are vulnerable, we can give them the space to do so without the fear of being shamed.

They have just as many emotional needs as we do. They should never be reduced down to simple minded morons driven by sex, food, sleep. They’re not animals, for fucks sake.

There is not much we can do in a world where resources for mental health are few and far between, we can’t overhaul the entire system in a day. Everyone is stretched thin, there’s not enough help to go around.

We can’t force the men in our individual lives to change and we can’t save them by our own willpower alone. That responsibility is still on them.

But we can change the way we talk about men. We can change the way we talk to men. We can change the way we look at them. We can believe they can change. We can be willing to have more compassion and love for men as a bigger picture.

This is about trying to break the cycle before it even starts.

Men are killing themselves, literally and figuratively, at alarming rates.

No one deserves to feel like they are so inherently defective that their only options are to continue to make the same mistakes, find solace in a bottle, or suffer alone in silence. If someone reading this needs to hear this, you are worth more than that and you deserve more than that.

I have lost almost every man I have ever loved in my life to addiction, suicide, or to the demons they couldn’t shake. They deserved better.

They were human beings. They were fathers, sons, partners, and friends.

We have to change the way we talk about men.