The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It's not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The o… - Glennon Doyle

Why do I trust everyone else on Earth more than I trust myself? WHERE THE HELL IS MY SELF? When did I lose touch with her?

Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a "real man's" dirty secret.

Our men are caged, too. The parts of themselves they must hide to fit into those cages are the slices of their humanity that our culture has labeled 'feminine' — traits like mercy, tenderness, softness, quietness, kindness, humility, uncertainty, empathy, connection. We tell them, 'Don't be these things, because these are feminine things to be. Be anything but feminine.'

The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits.
There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. 'Femininity' is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label 'feminine.'
Gender is not wild, it's prescribed.

The building of the true and beautiful means the destruction of the good enough. Rebirth means death. Once a truer, more beautiful vision is born inside us, life is in the direction of that vision. Holding on to what is no longer true enough is not safe; it's the riskiest move because it is the certain death of everything that was meant to be. We are alive only to the degree to which we are willing to be annihilated. Our next life will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true.

I have lost identities, beliefs, and relationships it has hurt to lose. I have learned that when I live from my emotions, knowing, and imagination, I am always losing. What I lose is always what is no longer true enough so that I can take full hold of what is.