"I get memes about 2016 being a disaster but not because of celebrity deaths or American Nazis (as a white dude, seeing police shootings or white supremacist partisan victories did not affect my body). Instead I’ve spent the year trying to heal from trauma without leaning too much on my friends and partners. Being a dude has complicated this because I’ve been trained to resolve mental health problems through distraction—most guys I know fuck around or get vicious to cover up their broken bones, but broken bones need casts to heal. And stoicism is bizarre to teach guys because it’s based on failure: silence often leads men to kill either themselves or the people around them (look at domestic abuse and murder rates from male to female partners; rates of childhood trauma in prisoners, or the gender divide of mass shootings and suicides).

Imagine if we applied this approach to building airplanes:

“So those are the engines that catch on fire?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We will take all of them.”  

Losing brilliant friends or partners in 2016 prompted me to research the communication behaviours of child abuse survivors. I learned that we’re prone to experience an ‘intimacy dysfunction’ where we are either too needy or too absent in order to avoid abandonment, either through an intrusive over-assurance or in being ‘not all emotionally there’ so that our ‘true selves’ are not rejected in a future breakup. I learned that male abuse survivors should be weary when seeking the support of women, considering the imbalances in our socialized expectations of unpaid gendered labour. I learned that above all we should avoid becoming Liz Kinnamon’s Male Sentimental, who manipulates women to avoid the discomfort required to change shitty behaviours.

So, after this research, I’ve decided to try and accept my imperfect reactions to revisited trauma. This has been complicated because the style of masculinity I was taught associates success with a myth of perfection (achievable by consuming material or stockpiling women). Being a survivor of emotional abuse also complicates things because I take critiques ‘fully,’ reinforcing the violent narratives told to me about me that I survived, bringing me to affirm critiques instead of defending myself. It’s been difficult not to take the critique of a female friend or partner as ‘absolutely true,’ and so I’m trying to consider them a similarly flawed human being with similarly flawed critiques—while not dismissing them entirely, as I’ve been programmed to do.

I’m ending 2016 by cutting toxic people out of my life and working to accept when I’ve been cut. That’s an easy line to write and harder to work through when it aligns with abandonment and the ideal dude as woman-hunter/consumer, but believing that women know what they’re doing when they cut us out is something a lot of guys I know could benefit from. While it makes sense that we act this way (our media romanticizes lines like “I asked your mother out thirty-eight times before she said yes,” suggesting that successful courtships are just a matter of the ‘determination’ of the man–erasing female agency, besides being pathetic), I do believe that we as men can reprogram ourselves. It feels necessary to me if I say that I care about the lives of the people around me now and in 2017."