We've been sold a version of strength that is actually just suppression dressed up in muscle. Real strength looks nothing like what we were taught.
I grew up in a world where men didn't cry. Where asking for help was weakness. Where the measure of a man was how much he could carry without showing the weight. I absorbed all of it. I became very, very good at it.
For twenty years I carried everything. The pressure of work. The weight of relationships I didn't know how to be present in. The grief I never processed. The fear I never named. I carried it all with a straight back and a steady voice and a drink in my hand.
The drink was the tell. It always is. Because suppression needs a valve. And the valve I chose — the one so many men choose — was the one that society handed me with a wink and called it culture.
The myth of the strong man says: don't feel it. The reality of the strong man is: feel it, but find somewhere private to put it. And when private runs out, find a bottle.
What I've learned — through recovery, through therapy, through walking thousands of miles and sitting with men who are breaking — is that the strongest thing a man can do is feel the thing he's been trained not to feel.
Not perform feeling. Not weaponise vulnerability for social approval. Actually feel it. Sit with it. Let it move through you without trying to manage it.
This is not soft. This is the hardest work I have ever done. Harder than any physical challenge. Harder than any professional achievement. Sitting in a room with your own grief and not running from it — that takes a kind of courage that no one ever taught us to value.
The men I work with through Street Therapy are not weak men. They are men who have been carrying enormous weight for a very long time. The work is not to make them softer. The work is to help them put the weight down — and discover that they are still standing.
Real strength is not the absence of feeling. Real strength is the capacity to feel without being destroyed by it. That's what we're building. One step at a time.