The Man I Was Supposed to Be

I grew up in Texas in the shadow of John Wayne.

Not literally. But close enough. The template was clear. Strength, silence, and the willingness to use force when force was called for. I absorbed it from film, from the men around me, from the fights that broke out because nobody stopped the boys from sorting it out with their fists. This was considered character building.

I was surrounded by violence. At school. In my community. On every screen I looked at. And I didn't question it. Not for a long time. That was just what men were. That was the deal.

Men and women were a dichotomy. Hard line. No spectrum. Anything feminine on a man was weakness, deviation, something to be corrected. You knew this the way you knew anything in a closed environment. Not because someone explained it. Because the consequences of getting it wrong were immediate and physical.

I followed the script. Not happily. But I followed it.

Then I saw Kurt Cobain perform in a dress on MTV.

I was a teenager. I did not have the language for what I was watching. I just knew it was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen.

Here was a man, loud, raw, arguably more aggressive on stage than anyone, wearing a dress. Wearing eyeliner. Not apologising for it. Not explaining it. Not performing femininity as a joke or a costume. Just doing it, completely unbothered, while the crowd lost their minds.

Eddie Vedder. Trent Reznor. Men who wrote songs about loneliness and fear and desire. Men who cried in public and put it on the album. Men who pushed every boundary about what a man was allowed to look, sound, and feel like, and did it with a kind of ferocious indifference to anyone's opinion.

My immediate reaction was not confusion.

It was "that is awesome".

Not because I wanted to wear a dress. Because I wanted that freedom for me and others. The freedom to just not give a fuck about how your manliness is being perceived. To push the boundary and let people deal with it. To exist outside the script entirely.

It wasn't relief exactly. I was still in Texas. The school was still the school. The community was still the community. The script was still being enforced every day by people who had never seen what I was watching on MTV and would not have liked it if they had.

It was a vent. A window. Proof that somewhere, someone was living differently.

That mattered more than I can explain.

The script is still being sold. It just has a new distributor.

Thirty years later, the template is back. Different packaging. Same structure.

There is a multi-billion dollar industry built on the idea that men are broken and need fixing. Not struggling. Not confused. Broken. And it has the fix.

Wake up at 5am. Cold shower. Cut this out. Optimise that. Complete the challenge. Restrict this. Subscribe to the program. Become the man you were supposed to be.

The business model requires that you never quite get there. A program that actually fixes you loses a customer. The profitable version keeps you close. Gives you enough wins to stay. Enough failures to keep buying.

This is not a conspiracy. It is subscription economics applied to identity.

And it is selling men the exact same thing Texas sold me. Manhood as a performance. Strength as the only metric. The idea that if you could just get the formula right, discipline yourself hard enough, eliminate the soft parts, you would finally be enough.

John Wayne didn't work.

Neither will the app.

The skills that actually compound don't work like this.

I have spent twenty years in rooms with men trying to lead. Not perform leadership. Actually lead.

The ones who got better over time, genuinely better, were not the ones who optimised their morning routines. They were the ones who learned how to listen without immediately trying to fix. How to stay in the room when the room got uncomfortable. How to say "I got that wrong" without it dismantling them.

Those are learnable skills. And once learned, they do not expire.

You do not renew listening monthly. You do not need an audience to keep your access. You use it, and it makes you better at the things that actually matter. Showing up. Staying present. Being someone people trust enough to tell the truth to.

Skill compounds. Performance requires maintenance.

The teenage version of me didn't understand that yet. He just knew that Kurt Cobain looked freer than anyone he'd ever seen in real life. That was enough to keep going until the geography changed.

Decent is a practice. Not a protocol.

The word "decent" is unfashionable. It does not trend. It does not come with a before and after you can screenshot.

But it is the right word.

A decent man is not an optimised man. He is a man who keeps trying to do right by the people around him. Who fails at it regularly. Who notices when he has failed. Who tries again. Who doesn't need a subscription to remind him why.

That is the whole thing.

Manhood is not a dichotomy. It never was. It is a spectrum, and you can move around on it, and nobody is coming to take your man card because you cried at a film (last time for me was Black Panther) or wore something unexpected or admitted you didn't know what you were doing.

Cobain knew that. Vedder knew that. Reznor knew that.

They just said it louder than anyone was ready for.

Build from there.

P.S. The most decent men I know are not the most disciplined men in the room. They are the most honest. There is a difference. It is not a small one.