18 Steps to manhood

When I was younger, I was insecure about my manhood. I had an abusive father who missed no opportunity to remind me daily what a failure and disappointment I was. He went out of his way to advertise his disapproval of everything I did, was and stood for. He repeated his disapproval so much that I eventually believed him. I became convinced that I was useless. So I ended up manifesting his self-fulfilling prophecy: as a loser young adult, I proved him right.

Having an abusive father is worse than having no father. Mine was blatantly neglectful unless he wanted to be abusive. I didn’t know what manhood was, because my masculine role-model didn’t know either; a true man never feels the need to cowardly abuse a child, to then conveniently call it “discipline”.

So, I thought that men were supposed to be aggressive, abusive, toxic, dishonourable, unkind, egocentric, arrogant, sociopathic. I thought that a “man” was the guy who fucked around with as many women as possible in a desperate effort to steal cheap quantity validation, rather than earn meaningful quality actualization. This is what I thought a man was. Boy, was I wrong… (pun intended).