We teach boys to hide their shame, and then wonder why men struggle with loneliness.
I’d been talking with my mom over coffee.
We’re in her kitchen and we wind up reminiscing. Perhaps it’s because we live in the same place again, relatively speaking, after more than a decade spent with hundreds, even thousands, of miles between us.
Somehow, we land on the topic of how I wasn’t that great a student as a kid.
Well, ok... we’re recalling how I was “very capable,” as my high school teachers would’ve said, and how my grades maybe didn’t always reflect the true level of that capability. I know now that there are plenty of legitimate reasons for that, my neurodivergence chief among them (undiagnosed at the time). Still, back then, I carried a lot of shame around those less-than-stellar grades and their, seemingly unexplainable, incongruence with my abilities…
That shame would later impact my friendships, relationships, career, and livelihood.
Mom’s sitting across from me at the head of the table. It’s mid morning on a Saturday and we’re fully down the rabbit hole now.
This whole thing began with a joke... one of those half-truths that isn’t so much “ha-ha funny” as it is ironic. We’re talking about that past shame of mine with a light-hearted fondness that only arrives after years of distance and some intentional reflection. So, I’d said, a bit hyperbolically, that maybe my calling was in academia as a psychological researcher. Mom then shoots me a knowing look with a half-grin to acknowledge my half-truth.
We both know why thinking of high-school-me as an academic is funny, even if we’re not laughing. She tilts her head with the weight of a fresh thought, and says in a more serious tone “That would really be something…” After a quick pause she added, “if you could help teens learn about how to have a healthier relationship with shame, that would be amazing.”
Shame; that’s what catapulted this whole discussion of ours in the kitchen to scenes from decades past. Now, Mom and I are both drifting in and out of daydreams, asking one another if we remember certain ones.
It’s innocuous enough but, still, I get stuck.
I’m replaying one very dreadful first day of Fall soccer from when I was a kid. I’m 5 years old and I’ve never played soccer before. It’s a new school year, but I’m new here altogether. Mom and I are walking along the edge of the school’s parking lot and I can feel my heart picking up speed, as it sometimes does, but I don’t say anything. In fact, I’m trying very hard not to. Up ahead, there’s a blur of kids all wearing shorts with socks up to their knees. The soccer fields are side-by-side and there are too many to count. I’m already overwhelmed by the cacophony of shrieks, thuds, and whistles.
And I don’t recognize anyone.
This big, green, grassy amusement park of people are bunched up into various clusters separated by orange cones. We’re shuffling alongside one of the clusters, when we reach a kid I don’t know and his dad talking by the cone closest to us. They’re all riled up—waving, pointing, shouting. I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I’m really hoping it’s not about the game.
I don’t even know how to play.
Slowly, I’m realizing that everyone else out there does. They clearly all know each other from school, too. In a moment of sheer panic, my tough, silent, and confident exterior crumbles. How come they all know what’s going on and I don’t? Am I supposed to? I don’t think I can fake this… They’re gonna know, and then I’m going to feel even lonelier than I do now.
The weight of it is suddenly too heavy—too extreme—and I burst into tears, hot with shame. Immediately, I wish I was anywhere else.
Sitting there in the kitchen with my mom, I absentmindedly crack the knuckle of my pointer finger with my thumb. Managing to pull my gaze away from its scan of nothing in particular among the countertop cabinets, I turn toward her and find a kind of “now what” expression looking back at me.
I’d been thinking about how, as humans, our relationship with shame seems to play a major role in how accountable we become. When I was a teen, I hid the fact that I struggled to get assignments done in school because I was ashamed of it. I continued to struggle like that until, eventually, I learned how to talk about it with other people.
Male friendships are, at their core, steeped in competition.
I’m not sure I was ever shown how to make or maintain friendships; male, or otherwise. If I’m honest, most of my early friendships were place-based. They formed in school, through sports, or at work. Some of those environments—if not all of them—are centered around competition. It makes me think of how boys grow up being told, shown, and pressured to be of use. I know at least I felt like I was being judged on that. Constantly. My sense of self felt tethered to my ability to do things of worth for someone else—that my value as a person depended on the say-so of others.
As far as I can tell, that’s the same kind of thinking that perpetuates our culture of oneupmanship and peacocking. That, and the many harmful tropes plastered across the movies kids grow up watching. You know, like needing to save the damsel in distress, or that bravery means beating up people who disagree with you. Oh, and can’t forget the insidious bologna that “nice guys finish last.”
These things, among others, seem at least part of the explanation for why boys full of shame become men full of fear… Guys around the globe are dying by suicide, at an alarming rate, without ever having revealed their pain to anyone.
I was almost one of them.
My eyes drift to where the sun’s shining in through the kitchen window. Mom’s still watching me gather my thoughts.
It wasn’t until college, perhaps even my twenties, that I worked to decouple my self-worth from the output I could create for others. For many of the men I know, those things are tightly interwoven, still, well into their adulthood. I have to believe this plays a role in the male loneliness crisis we’re facing.
Despite the competitive lens through which I was raised, I feel incredibly lucky to have forged some seriously strong friendships. A while back, one of my friends from college sent me a pretty lengthy text out of the blue. We used to be very close, but our get-togethers have, admittedly, grown further and further apart. It’s been trending that way for a few years now. That’s also something I’ve written about quite openly. What’s more, I’d been wrestling for a bit with how much of myself I felt comfortable sharing with our friend group. But I hadn’t realized this friend was regularly reading my writing.
Oh... oh shit.
Like it or not, I played a prominent role in our drift, and I was harboring quite a bit of shame around it, too. In that text, this friend called me out. And I’m so glad they did. They told me directly that they cared about me and sensed my distance—that they wanted to talk about it and were all ears if I was comfortable enough with doing so.
I’m so lucky.
SO, so lucky.
Having met in college, we’ve been through plenty of fun times together, but we’ve also been there for each other during breakups, cross-country moves, and existential conversations about what to do with each of our wild and precious lives. We’ve long been vulnerable enough with each other to be truly honest.
So I told them what was bothering me, and the shame I felt about it.
What I realized is that every interaction amongst our friends had starting feeling like a contest. And, once I was aware of the pattern, I couldn’t unsee it.
At a group get-together a while back, I watched it happen time and again when someone would strike up a conversation. They’d kick things off, and then another person would link whatever was said to a movie quote or reference. The next person would do the same, adding on a call-back to someone or something else.
Round-and-round we’d go.
It wasn’t even a new pattern… it was one I’d long participated in, too. Maybe I just couldn’t see it, or maybe I hadn’t had the language to label it for the contest it was. But once I did, it made me uncomfortable. And realizing that made me really sad.
During that group get-together, I’d noticed the usual references and reminiscing had evolved, verryyy subtilely, into a version where the call-backs became put-downs. That’s the part that really sucked, actually. It felt like hanging out together had just become a game of who could come up with the sneakiest insult.
It’s only because of the strong, foundational dynamic of trust this friend and I built up over years and years of flubbing our way through the fear of sharing our feelings with each other that a conversation like this was possible.
And, via text no less.
Something similar actually came up between my partner and I, back when we first started seeing each other.
Movie quotes and the like were the way I best knew how to connect with people. It’s what we’d done on my sports teams growing up, at summer camp, in high school, during college, and even at various workplaces. Not her—her approach was different. So we talked about it. And what it helped me to realize, was that I’d been using pop-culture references as a social crutch… as a way to bond with people without sharing much information about myself, if any at all.
That was early into seeing each other, but I really liked her so I challenged myself to put the references down and start sharing more openly. I thought of it kind of like how a writer might try to avoid clichés by coming up with their own descriptions for things. Doing that required a lot of vulnerability and a willingness to be seen that I wasn’t very good at because I’d never practiced.
I later discovered that this choreography was pretty similar to how Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, approaches relational repair. He advocates for leaning on a strong, empathetic foundation, and a willingness to be vulnerable, as a way to avoid blame and defensiveness in relationships. To do that, he suggests using Beth Polin’s 5 Rs of an apology:
Most notably, this philosophy of repair requires owning the impact of your actions, rather than clinging to the intent behind them. That’s so important. And as uncomfortable as it is, it requires leaning in and engaging instead of pulling away and isolating.
That’s something I was never shown as a kid. It wasn’t until I was trained to facilitate conflict resolution as a wilderness guide that I started to grasp its importance. Ironically, somewhere around the time I first got sober in 2021, I forgot this pearl of wisdom and began pulling away and isolating from my friends. It was hard to admit that my journey of wanting to like myself more came at the cost of straining pretty much all of my relationships. But, one of the mistakes I made was thinking I could achieve it by avoiding the possibility of feeling any shame at all.
What I really needed was to lean into my trusting relationships, so there’d be a place to talk about shame when faced with it.
That’s why I was so excited about my friend reaching out, because asking to talk things through is what led to the open and honest conversation that followed. Multiple of them, really.
We’ve even started emailing each other more regular life updates. In the time since, I feel like our conversations offer something they never did before: named intimacy, rather than inferred closeness. I get to hear about the latest with this friend’s kiddo, the funny thing that happened after work, and their actual feelings toward making life happen every day with their spouse. It’s not small talk or once a year banter—we’re not even catching up anymore, really, because we’re collaborating more in real-time through short, no-pressure snippets.
Across from me, mom shifts in her seat. The mid morning brightness is now highlighting an expression of deep curiosity on her face.
I tell her that releasing my shame from its hiding place required a level of trust I hadn’t been willing to participate in back then—that learning how to go about it differently is something I’ve been curious about ever since my teenaged struggles all those years ago. So, that’s when I started absorbing, collecting, and experimenting with different ways of doing things.
“Some of it,” I explained, “comes from Brené Brown’s work, some from Andrew Huberman, Gabor Maté, Carol Dweck, and Adam Grant. Some from Angela Duckworth and Richard Schwartz...” I trailed off.
Mom’s eyes were glazing over.
I leaned forward.
“I’ve accidentally been working toward my PhD in Cognitive Psychology all these years... without getting any credit for it!”
Sure, it was a joke. I’d delivered the line with an air of faux incredulity and we’d smirked at each other. But my half-truth kept hanging there, lingering, in the air between us.
Last summer, I finally admitted I was lonely.
I wrote about how I was among the many men who feel this way. I’d noticed my friendships had fallen off a cliff when I stepped away from social media a few years ago. Between that, getting sober, and a handful of other factors, I’d felt more and more like I couldn’t communicate effectively anymore. So, I set out to do something about it. I challenged myself to learn more about storytelling and started telling stories at The Moth to keep myself accountable. I even began writing a daily column to further hone my skills.
Nine months later, I heard my name get called over the speakers to go up on stage at The Moth. Then, I swallowed the mouthful of water I’d been holding onto.
The theater was dark, and my mouth gets dry when I’m about to speak in front of an audience. I rose from my seat and made my way to the front while taking a few sharp inhales through my nose. Climbing the steps, I let out a slow exhale as I walked into the spotlights and took my place in front of the mic. Sue, the event host, adjusted the stand, gave me a smile, and then disappeared stage-left.
I looked out at the crowd, peering into the darkness beyond the stage-lighting. With my feet firmly planted, I relaxed my shoulders and reminded myself to stand up straight. I gave myself a silent “you got this”, then smiled and began telling the story of how I chose to save my own ass instead of helping someone else because of the hidden shame I carried.
After I finished, I moved out of the spotlight and could finally see the faces in the crowd and hear their thunderous applause. Descending the steps to return to my seat, I clenched my jaw and felt my throat swell as I walked past tearful smiles and nods of appreciation. In a culture where ridicule runs rampant, we expect people to conceal their shame in perpetuity. All I know, is that collaboration and contribution, not competition, is what helps me offload mine.
This wasn’t the first time I told a story at The Moth, but I think it was the first time I felt like I truly belonged. I missed first place by just a fraction of a point, coming in second (again). One of these times I’m going to win. Maybe. Or, maybe I won’t…
Either way, I’m just going to keep showing up.
Because I’m tired of seeing boys full of shame become men full of fear.
If you enjoy reading my writing, I publish short reflections like this each day as part of my daily column, Kickturn.
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