If I Were You

If I were you I’d get out of my own way. I’d try to stop myself from letting cynicism settle into my bones like freshly poured concrete. Because that shit’ll stick and stop you from being open as you get older. You’ll become resentful of anyone who’s trying.

That’s a bad way to go.

Judgement will spew from you like kettle steam in every utterance. All the quiet jabs, the witty remarks. All they do is hide a pain you hold because you never let yourself try. And so everyone who does try is just a reminder of everything you never attempted. And that’s a bad way to fucking go.

If I were you I would also stop with the ‘manly’ shtick. You know, the tired rhetoric of what it means to be a man. Stoic and heroic is just code for emotionally inept and violent for a cause. But every case of violence is for a cause, and very few of them are just. Very few of them can be justified.

Because you know, if you’re a man, then whatever way you turn up in this unlikely place is manly, so to speak. I cried las week, and I can’t grow a beard, and I don’t enjoy watching football every week. And yet I’m still a man. As manly as they come because a set of social defined characteristics doesn’t mean anything at all. And while we’re on the subject, I’m so tired of talking about masculinity. As if the entirety of a single person can be reduced to one factor. Because you are man. But you are also friend. You are son. You are joy. You are sighs of relief. You are human. You are so unlikely. So unbelievably unlikely and yet you want to focus on this bizarrely specific characteristic that none of us have any control over? Why not pour that energy into something more productive? Call your grandmother, tell your father you love him. You’ll be a man of impact if you do shit like that. What a difference you’ll make then.

If I were you, if I had the time you have still, I would stop pretending. Far earlier than I did, I would stop putting on vast quantities of masks just to fit in. To be unseen. The most precious thing about you is what makes you different. We think differences divide us, but they actually lift us up. At some point things reverse. When you’re young you think that fitting in is the most important thing. But you’re just like everyone else. And then you get a little bit older and you realize that you haven’t developed any personality, or you haven’t really gotten to know yourself because you’ve been making believe as your friends this whole time. And they’ve been doing the same thing. So all of you have been pretending to be someone who has never existed, just to fit in.

So I would stop that. I would own my shit. I would like poetry out loud, and I would hate football out loud. I would like musicals and practice karate, and I wouldn’t give a flying fuck what anyone else thought because it would just mean that I was before my time. Because eventually, they will catch on. Their bodies will tell them. And if I could back in time with this knowledge, it would change everything. Genuinely.