I didn’t set out to write about masculinity.
Like many people who eventually find themselves writing about something deeply personal, I started writing simply because I needed somewhere for my thoughts to go. It began during a difficult period in my life, when language felt like the only place where confusion, frustration, and emotion could exist without needing to be resolved immediately. Writing became a quiet kind of refuge—a space where I could examine things honestly, even when I didn’t yet have answers.
At first, the writing was private. Fragments in notebooks. Reflections that were never meant to be read by anyone else. But over time, patterns began to appear. Again and again, I found myself returning to the same questions: why do so many men struggle to talk about what they feel? Why does vulnerability often feel like something we must apologize for? And why do so many of us grow up believing that strength requires silence?
Those questions eventually became the foundation of my work.
Masculinity is one of the most powerful cultural scripts many of us inherit, but it is rarely handed to us directly. No one sits us down and explains the rules in clear terms. Instead, we absorb them gradually—through jokes in locker rooms, through the way boys learn to police one another’s behavior, through the subtle ways emotion is encouraged in some forms but discouraged in others. Over time, those lessons accumulate until they feel less like rules and more like reality.
Strength becomes associated with restraint.
Vulnerability becomes something to hide.
Desire becomes something to control or disguise.
And while many men sense that something about this arrangement feels incomplete, it can be difficult to imagine an alternative.
This is the tension that continues to draw me back to the subject.
I’m interested in the moments when the script begins to break down—when the version of masculinity someone has learned no longer fits the life they are trying to live. Sometimes that shift arrives through relationships. Sometimes through loss, or through failure, or simply through the slow accumulation of experiences that make the old rules feel increasingly narrow.
Those moments of friction can be uncomfortable, but they can also be clarifying. They create space for questions that might otherwise remain unasked. What does strength actually mean? What emotions have we learned to hide from ourselves? And what might masculinity look like if it allowed a fuller range of human experience?
These questions don’t belong to any single person, and they certainly don’t have simple answers. My work doesn’t attempt to offer a new set of rigid definitions or prescribe a single model for how men should live. Instead, I’m more interested in exploring the gray areas—the places where identity, vulnerability, and desire intersect in ways that feel both personal and cultural at the same time.
Writing about masculinity also inevitably means writing about intimacy. The ways we relate to others are shaped by the expectations we carry about ourselves. When emotional expression is limited, relationships often become narrower as well. When vulnerability is treated as weakness, the possibility for deeper connection becomes harder to access.
But the opposite is also true. When those expectations begin to loosen—even slightly—new possibilities can emerge. Conversations become more honest. Relationships become more layered. People begin to recognize parts of themselves that had previously been pushed aside.
This is why so much of my writing circles around ideas like softness, honesty, and emotional openness. These qualities are sometimes framed as opposites of strength, but I’ve come to believe they require a different kind of courage altogether. It takes effort to question the identities we’ve inherited. It takes patience to untangle habits that have been reinforced for years. And it takes a certain amount of bravery to admit that the roles we’ve been playing might not tell the whole story of who we are.
In that sense, writing about masculinity is less about critique and more about exploration. I’m interested in the possibility that the conversation around masculinity can expand rather than simply polarize—that we can talk about strength and vulnerability in the same breath without assuming they cancel each other out.
The books I’ve written approach these questions from different angles. Sometimes through poetry, sometimes through memoir, sometimes through personal essays that step back and look at the cultural patterns surrounding individual experience. But beneath those different forms runs the same underlying curiosity: how do we become more honest versions of ourselves?
For me, writing continues to be one of the ways that exploration happens. It creates a space where ideas can be examined slowly, where contradictions can exist without being forced into immediate resolution, and where the complexities of identity can be approached with patience rather than certainty.
Masculinity will likely remain part of that conversation for a long time—not because it is the only thing worth writing about, but because it intersects with so many other questions about identity, desire, vulnerability, and the ways we learn to move through the world.
Ultimately, the work isn’t about defining masculinity once and for all. It’s about creating room for more possibilities within it.
And writing, for me, is one way of making that room.