Activity

Hey everyone. Wrote this previously and wanted to share it here. It’s a bit of my story. It’s copied from a previous share of mine and was a response to a post about masculinity and how I was learning what it meant to me. Specifically, the post to which I commented was about the fallacy of the idea of the alpha male. I think it speaks well to how I came to discover how my mental health struggles detailed herein were a disordered response to the confusion of being a spiritual being having a human experience and not knowing it and how I now have the eyes to see my mental health issues for the gifts they always were:

I compared myself against the ideal alpha male my entire life because I never felt I measured up to who society expected me to be as a man. I was shy, socially anxious, physically weak and uncoordinated, fearful of people, unworthy, indecisive and avoided girls and relationships despite my attraction and respect for them. Despite thinking I was never good enough and reflecting that back to the world, I also felt strangely proud of being true to my strong values and my innate “goodness” that didn’t seem valued by society. I felt this at the expense of severe lifelong depression and social anxiety.

3 years ago, I learned of avoidant personality disorder. Suspecting I had it, I was relieved rather than discouraged. Relieved to have some sort of explanation for how different and detached from others I had felt all my life. I wasn’t diagnosed with it but rather told I have traits of the disorder. Didn’t matter. I was energized by the discovery and sought out online communities for support. This led me to my discovery of coaching and my first coach. It led to my discovery of coaching both as a therapy for myself and a potential purposeful career down the road. I’ve take coaching training but am still working towards taking the leap to do it on my own.

For now, I’ve been immersing myself in working with various coaches over the years and engaging various courses and self development programs and communities. As I progressed and gained deeper insight into myself and compassion for my journey, I dove into exploring my relationship to my own masculinity and sexuality, for which I’d held intense lifelong shame and guilt. I avoided sex most of my life out of shame for how men, most of whom I associated with being alphas, would treat women or harass them or abuse them. Despite never doing this myself, I took the guilt they should’ve earned for themselves and turned it against myself for being male. I was intensely ashamed of my privilege, my gender, my body and my humanness and struggled with suicidal ideation throughout my life.

It was through coaching that I started taking responsibility for my own experience of my past. I stopped blaming and living silently in victim consciousness, something I’d been unaware I’d even been doing. I became aware of something I’d always been connected to and vaguely aware of, myself as a spiritual being having a human experience. I started to stop seeing myself as my ego, finally realizing it was a mental construct no more real than a tv show. I was taught to love myself and to see the outer world as a projection of my inner world. And it all made sense to me as if I was remembering what I’d already known. I started to see there were as many different ways to be masculine as there were men. More even, since we all, male or female, are expressions of the divine feminine and masculine. I decided I get to create what masculinity meant for me and that society only had the power over this decision that I granted to it, albeit subconscious. I learned that my feelings were neither good or bad, but simply signs of where I was either in or out of alignment with my truest, highest Self. I’m learning to honor all my feelings and all my beliefs and release the ones that don’t serve me any more after learning what they had been in my experience to teach me.

There’s so much more to my story and to who I am than even what I’ve written. And there’s so much more to who I can be. But the knowledge that I have now, that I am complete and whole and worthy and enough just as I am in this moment, just as I’ve always been, even in my lowest moments of my life, has been liberating and inspiring to me to express what I was put here to be. And it frees me from the societal constructs of masculinity and whether I’m a alpha, beta, omega. I’m too expansive, we all are, to be defined by any label of any sort.