The book I can’t write without you

The first song I ever wrote was a knockoff Blink 182 melody over a four-chord pattern I stole from New Found Glory. I wanted to be famous. On TV. Away from my sleepy Maryland hometown. Attractive to the cool girls at school.

That’s how my brain works. Find something to emulate. Take it apart and figure out how it works. Make my own version.

Years ago, I read a Jim Jarmusch quote about making movies that relieved me: ”Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.” It meant I wasn’t the only one.

I’m in the middle of this process with books, sifting through bell hooks’s The Will to Change and Natalie Goldberg’s Long Quiet Highway and Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. Books I struggled to put down when they first absorbed me. Writers who make me feel like I’m their best friend getting to hear their unique experience. Writing that makes me feel less alone and heartbroken in this unfair, grueling, soul-destroying society.

I want to write a book for men struggling with relationships, dating, loneliness, purposelessness, stuff I’ve struggled with. The book I needed when I was 25 and lonely living alone in my band’s warehouse practice space. And again at 30, stunned by the agonizing ending of a relationship I’d thought was forever. And at 35, trudging through Facetime dates in the middle of a pandemic.

Notice that none of the books I listed were written by men. Male writers have taught me things (and female writers too). Marx’s writings. Richard Schwartz’s You’re the One You’ve Been Waiting For. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. Mind-blowing and world-shaking things. But I can’t remember one that gripped and moved me at the sentence level. That let me into the writer’s interior experience. That connected that experience with politics and power in society. That embodied the second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political.”

I’m sure books like that by men exist (let me know if you’ve read one!). But I’d bet even fewer exist that focus on the particular experience of being a man.

One book that did sort of help me through those low times was David Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man. It answered a bunch of questions I’d been struggling with and that men tend to not talk about. Why certain things we do tend to be attractive and why others don’t. Why I’d bickered so much with ex-partners. Why the sex had dried up. How to balance working a job with being present in a relationship. But it was ultimately counterproductive.

It made me self-conscious and performative around women, on dates but even at work. I worried about being “masculine” enough, always having a plan, never wavering, always appearing calm, cool, and collected. Everything a woman did in response to me became a reflection of my “masculine energy”—or lack thereof. It was exhausting and borderline toxic.

I want my book to be just as helpful, but without the gender essentializing hocus pocus about masculine and feminine “energies.” I want other men to know what I’ve learned through working with hundreds of men in therapy and writing this newsletter. It’s not our fault that we’re lonely, confused, and dying for a sense of purpose. The problem is how we’ve been socialized to fit into capitalist society.

Returning to so-called “traditional” gender norms (which aren’t actually traditional, btw) isn’t the answer. The answer is unlearning the unhelpful things we’ve been taught about being a man, like overrelying on our partner for emotional support. It’s reclaiming what’s been taken from us by a society that wants us to be an emotionless cog in the machine. It’s fumbling our way through relearning the ability that all humans have to connect on an emotional level.

The answer is relationships. Putting in as much effort as you do lifting weights or following your favorite football team (go Cowboys) into connecting with the people in your life and community. Learning how to open up and talk about feelings. Being curious. Listening.

But it’s not just an inside job. We must also join movements and support politicians who fight for changes to our economy and political system to make this type of connection easier. Medicare for All. Universal paid leave. Publicly funded childcare. Higher pay. Shorter workweeks. We can’t fix our problems all by ourselves (which is another false assumption we make because of how we’ve been socialized).

So this is me announcing that I’m going to write a book, and asking for help. What’s standing in the way is what all of us who aren’t rich need more of: time. I mean, yeah, there’s also the part of me that so fears rejection that he’d rather not shoot his shot at all. But I’ve got support for that one: my therapist, my partner, my writer friends.

What I don’t have is chunks of time outside of seeing clients and trying to be an “influencer” on here and Instagram, which is required these days to get a book published.

Here’s the ask… Will you help me make time? Will you chip in $5/month as a paid subscriber so I can write a book proposal before the end of the year? You’ll also get occasional bonus posts and discounted access to my workshops and retreats (like my dad’s weekend retreat in November).

With warmth & solidarity,
Jeremy