Masculinity Is a Disease We Give Little Boys

Man stuff. Tony Hoagland. New pod with another Swamp Dogg hidden track.

I had a terrible mental health week last week, and it had nothing to do with You Know What. No, before that happened, I received a text last Sunday from a friend of mine that someone we both knew ended their life. This wasn't this person's first attempt, maybe not even the second. There was faulty wiring that they never got fixed.

I wrote about this person a couple of years ago. It was the guy who jumped out of his fourth-story apartment only to be saved by his jacket getting caught on a high fence on the way down. He suffered massive injuries, and it took a year's worth of physical rehab to walk again, but he survived. 

We began to communicate fairly regularly while he was still in the hospital—a second chance at life was awarded to him by the slimmest of margins. But he was "ready for a change," is how he put it. So we talked, and he was never too specific about what was wrong, only that he'd been given Trazodone and Gabapentin to get settled after the good drugs were taken away, but he was still searching for the right combo to help depression. We'd communicate on Instagram messages, and I'd get his updates. He'd sign off with "Love you, brother!" but we never graduated to a phone call, and it didn't seem like any "change" was sticking. And that turned out to be true—he never found a joyful life that didn't contain massive amounts of drugs and booze. "He finished the job," was what my friend texted me. Threw himself out of the same apartment window, too. A new violent end. 

I emailed my psychiatrist, Dr. Bobak, early Monday morning and asked for an emergency session as an extra precaution. My suicidalness is pretty in check thanks to my own meds (Gabs, Lamictal, Zyprexa), but this one had some teeth to it. I gave Dr. Bobak the relevant plot points, and then she asked what was coming up for me. I told her it was "less sadness, more fright" since I was carrying around that icy ghosts-on-the-back feeling and wanted to keep them off of me but could not.

She asked me again if I'd like to move away from Lamictal and bump to Lithium. I told her I'm not entirely done poring over all the Reddit threads about the pros/cons yet. "It's on my list," though. It was a short video call but a necessary one. 

On Tuesday, I had a therapy session with Marty. He'd already heard about my status since he always swapped info with Bobak about me, and she called him to let him know what was up. We talked more about what happened. "It feels like my brain is shoving me in front of a moving train" was one way I wanted to describe it, but I said something less artfully descriptive. 

By Wednesday, I was less suicidal, but on Thursday, it bubbled up again but finally popped and went away by Friday. As of this moment, it's still good, but I always feel so lame when I'm at a loss for any language other than the fact that I got seriously triggered by that suicide. Triggered—this week at this particular moment in history? Gotta be tougher than that, A.J. 

Perfect segue into this week's podcast. Our guest is writer/editor/drunk/friend John Devore, and we did a number on each other, discussing our continuing struggles with manhood. 

“Yeah, I, you know, I, I'm, I ask myself. I wonder where my, for lack of a better term, my toxic masculinity and my alcoholism began or ended; You, I, we Americans, we love guns. We love war and violence. I loved action movies. My mom loved action movies. And in 80s action movies, there was always a scene where the hero had to perform self-surgery on himself. Rambo does it. Dalton in Roadhouse does it. Watching that as a young kid really said to me that masculinity was being able to absorb pain.”

He's an extremely smart and thoughtful human and a helluva writer (both long-form and short-form), so after you listen, invest some more time into his work.

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See you down there.