MensThought

By Joey Casey

18AUG2026

Imagine one day you are walking along the sidewalk of a quiet neighborhood street. All is well with the world, it’s your day off and you have a whole bunch of enjoying and entertaining things to do instead of the usual drudgery that comes with the foul word known as: Adulting.

Your not quiet sure when it happens, or even what causes it. Maybe it’s the tempature, or the way the sun light hits you, or the soft breeze of the wind, maybe it’s the time of year. Regardless something triggers in a man to cause him to flash back to when he was a boy and how he and his grandfather would go for walks on days like today.

You take a moment to acknowledge the feeling of nostalgia and even the peace it brings to you. But suddenly, like a friehgt train you feel a tightness in your chest. Pure physical pain that makes you want to whimper like a child. Naturally you hold it in, you’re a grown man. Grown men dont just cry out of no where. In some regards there is some truth to that but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

You compose yourself and surpress it, pushing it down into your gut where it can be processed with all the other crap you’ve had to ingest as of late. You look side to side, hoping no one caught that moment of weakness and once you verify you are in the clear. You continue on with your day. But now, all you want to do is sleep and do nothing.

Lets be honest, That pain is REAL

Gentlemen of the councle, us men have a mental health problem, whether we want to admit it or not,

It started when we were boys and told “boys dont cry”. Even when we were physically injured we were taught to “suck it up” under the disapproving gaze of a grown man or an older boy. We were conditioned by a society to hide what we felt and cherish it as a sign of strength. That a true man is stoic and lets nothing rattle him, including his emotions. This is that toxic masculinity that I bring up. A man who is unfeeling is incapable of kindness, compassion and empathy, much less love. The unfeeling man, however, is a myth. We are all human beings and whether we want them or not, emotions are a part of who we are.

Put into perspective, the ones who told us not to feel pain are the same uninformed, manipulative boobs who insist women choose the bear over men and downplay men’s mental health concerns as a weakening of real masculinity. People, like this, men and women are damaged and jaded individuals themselves who want to make others feel as they do. Some even get a sense of pleasure breaking others down to their level. Misery, loves company.

What is pain? put simply by the National Institute of Neurological disorders and stroke; “Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. No two people feel pain the same way, even if the reasons for their pain are alike. Pain is a highly personal experience and a person’s report of their own pain is the best measure. Pain can feel mild or severe. Pain can include pricking, tingling, stinging, burning, shooting, aching, or electric sensations.
Pain is among the most important signals our body gives to help us survive. Pain can alert us to harmful changes in the body, like cancer, or help us learn to avoid something harmful, like touching a hot stove. In this way, some forms of pain keep us safe.
In other cases, pain exists or continues without any known cause or benefit. Pain that continues for longer than three months is called chronic pain. Chronic pain can happen without a known cause and persist after an injury or known cause is resolved. It can affect a person’s mood, relationships, movement, and all aspects of daily life. Pain can make it harder to do necessary tasks, work, and enjoy activities.“

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That sudden pain you’re feeling is an alarm bell. Something has been causing you inmeasurable harm, in this case, most likely mental and emotional. It doesn’t have to be a memory of your grand father. It can be how your wife used to fix you eggs for breakfast, or the way sun light filters through a particular tree. By surpressing our emotional pain and ignoring it, is like ignoring the signs of cancer or heart disease. Emotions are a scientifically recognized chemical response to an external stimuli. According the the American Pyschological Association (APA)”When you encounter a stimulus, subcortical brain structures—most notably the amygdala, constantly evaluates your surroundings for threats, rewards, or significance. When it detects something important, it fires signals to the autonomic nervous system, releasing hormones like adrenaline, cortisol. This causes immediate physical shifts, such as a racing heart, sweating, or muscle tension.” That’s proof our emotions do have a physical response within us. When we dont acknowledge those emotions, the brain begins to produce more and more of the hormones necessary for an emotional response. It will do this until something breaks, the brain becomes saturated in a particular hormone, leaving one incapable of effectively feeling other emotions.

The truth is, we are encouraged to be stoic individuals, as mentioned earlier. But there is a serious misconception of what true stoicism is. Many would take the words of the philosphers such as Marcus Aurelius and Senecca as stoisicm being stone cold robots, unfeeling and unrelenting. But this is a fallacy of modern pop philosophy. Marcus Aurellius never said surpress your emotions. Instead he made it a focus on reframing the judgements of your emotions, that events dont hurt us, our judgements do and our judgements have been based on unreasonable expectations. Boys and men do in fact feel pain. This is where being kind to yourself is important. Allow yourself to acknowledge the pain, then proceed to judge if the pain is as bad as it is or isn’t. Or consider extreme emotions such as rage and anger. Lashing out used to be considered a sign that a man has power over others. but in fact, this is destructive, people wont respect you, they’ll fear you and in time, come to loathe you. Which is why Stoics, when given bad news usually take a breath before responding. As the Emperor put it “There is nothing manly about rage. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human, and therefore more manly… The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.” This is why an antagonizer gets more infuriated when a man doesnt have an angry outburst. You are denying them the power they want over you, that thrill they get for bringing another down to their level. You are being strong.

The Emperor also taught us that emotions when acknowledged is healthy for us. When his children died, the face of stoicism wept openly in front of others. The goal for us is to be free of passion but full of love. This is expressed significantly in the works of the Professor, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. We see in nearly all his works grown men crying at the loss of a comrade or a loved one. Tolkien himself fought in world war one and saw many comrades of his die in the horrific theatre of post industrialized warfare. I may be mistaaken but I believe he was also the only surviving male who went to war from his home town. But aside from grief, loss and tears he also showed real love in his stories. His love for his wife Edith is reflected in the tales of Beren and Luthien in fact. He describes Luthien as how he saw his wife, as the daughter of a deity and an immortal high king of elves. He was indeed full of love for his wife and his lost comrades. He did not allow his passions to get the better of him in the end.

Truama is perhaps one of the hardest of situations to overcome and in some form, we all have a truama in our lives. It can be that wound that causes a simple afternoon walk to turn into a sudden risk of a meltdown in public. It’s okay if that wound still hurts, because there is no cure or recovery for things like PTSD. We just learn methods to cope with it and to control our emotions. Men, we have all felt things like rejection and loss. It is understanding that tomorrow the sun will rise and begin a new day and bring with it something new. There are days I pray to God that he take away my memories so they dont hurt so much. But, such prayers are unkind to myself. Considering I watched my grandfather, the one I used to take afternoon walks with, die from Alzhiemers and watched as his memories were stripped away one by one until he couldn’t recognize his own children, much less his grand children. Talk about real hell on Earth.

I’ve said it before: I’m no doctor, no scholar—just a retired Sailor in Oklahoma, trying to make peace with my own emotions and demons and sharing what I learn along the way. But maybe that’s exactly why these questions won’t leave me alone: if men like you and me don’t stop and think, who will? We are men—descendants of kings and mighty conquerors—yet how often do we treat ourselves like we’re disposable, like our worth is something the world hands out in rations? Who told us we only deserve rest when we’re broken, love only when we’re useful, respect only when we’re silent? And why did we believe them? I believe the Lord God put a powerful tool in your skull and mine: a brain. It’s what allowed us to become the dominant species on this planet, to cross oceans, survive storms, and build lives out of almost nothing. But what happens when that tool is never cared for, never questioned, never sharpened? What happens to a man who spends his whole life using his mind to endure, but never to understand himself? Like all tools, the mind must be maintained, sharpened, and honed—and the Stoics knew this. They didn’t write their words down because life was easy; they wrote them because life was hard, and men were breaking under the weight of it. Their pages are a kind of inheritance, a reminder that we are allowed to examine our pain instead of just carrying it. My hope is simple: that one day we men learn to treat ourselves as we truly deserve, not as society tells us we deserve. And maybe that starts with a few uncomfortable questions we stop running from and finally sit with.

The next time you feel that dull ache in your chest, ask yourself if you’ve acknowledged all your emotions and judged them accordingly. You will find that you will become capable of greater compassion, empathy and indeed a true leader of men when you bring peace to yourself.