By Dave Thomas
Life is hard; it’s even harder when you’re stupid. Pretty solid words, but we’re all stupid in some respects. There are things we don’t address, things that as “manly men” we were taught to bottle up and lock away. These things and those actions have repercussions if you don’t figure out how to handle them.
If you’ve led a life even remotely worth living, you’ve loved and lost along the way. I’m not talking about your ex; I’m talking about real loss. Losing a family member suddenly, a brother in battle, watching a friend fade away from illness, or worse, take their own life. As men we are conditioned from an early age to understand that we can’t let that out, it’s got to be stopped up and contained, pushed down deep inside. That approach doesn’t work. Part of maturing is understanding you have to handle your shit somehow. Identify a problem, create a solution.
Mental health still seems a taboo subject to most people—dudes especially. Our life experiences make us the people we are, and good or bad we can’t change them. We can come to grips with them though. I’m bad about it. Like many of you, my life hasn’t been all sunshine and daisies. We build coping mechanisms to handle the heavy lifting, but little shit slips out and becomes part of our persona.
Most people think of therapy as the chaise lounge in the stuffy office with some white haired transplant from the 70’s asking what you see in a Rorschach blot. That’s the formal style. You can build your own therapy regimen. Mine? Range, gym, and motorcycle. When I’m on a rifle, lifting, or twisting the throttle, nothing else matters. At the range, my attention is solely on that firearm. At the gym, it’s the same. Focus on the motions of proper body mechanics. Pick it up, put it down, repeat. Emptying your mind and focusing on one thing and one thing only serves as my “reset”. To put it another way, it’s like having fresh eyes on a problem that you’ve been fighting. My bike is my happy place. Out on a two lane highway with limited traffic, everything stops. It’s almost a zen experience where I have 80% of my focus on the bike, and the other 20% is slowly opening that previously sealed-up bottle. The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.
That’s my therapy. It’s how I stay the relatively reasonable man I am. In the hopes of not being too cliche, you cannot let that shit stay bottled up. It will ruin you without you realizing it. So pour two fingers, light a cigar, and figure out your therapy. We become better people when we do.
