Feel Everything.

What Happens When We Stop Numbing and Start Naming

When my father died, I didn’t tell many people. Not because I was trying to be stoic or noble. Not even because I didn’t want support. The truth is, it didn’t occur to me that grief was something you shared. I booked the flight, signed the forms, planned the cremation. I shook hands, nodded politely, and flew back. I cremated him and put the ashes in a closet—along with whatever feelings I didn’t know how to name.

Weeks later, someone I love deeply looked at me and said, “How dare you not tell me your father passed away. I wanted to be there for you.”

And I had no defense. No explanation. Just silence. She was right—I hadn’t offered her the chance to show up because somewhere along the way, I had learned not to show up for myself. I had no language for my own pain. I was fluent in logistics. Useless in loss. It’s not that I didn’t feel anything. I just didn’t know how to translate the ache into words. And I know now—I’m not alone in that. Especially not as a man.

Raised To Be Tough, Not Whole

For those of us raised to be men—especially men of our generation—the emotional playbook was brutal in its simplicity: win, suppress, provide, perform. Vulnerability wasn’t a virtue. It was a liability.

From schoolyards to sidelines to screen icons—our coaches, our teachers, our fictional heroes—they all told us: be tough, stay quiet, keep moving. We learned to armor up before we learned to articulate.

We were trained—by institutions built for burnout, by societies that fear softness—to think emotions are the enemy of reason. We were shaped by patriarchy, conditioned by hustle culture, seduced by the productivity myth, and restrained by legacy masculinity. And in that design, emotions became liabilities.

And for a long time, I believed all of it. I performed strength like a good soldier—head down, chest out, feelings buried somewhere beneath the “to dos”, the triumphs and the disappointments. I measured myself by how little I needed, how much I could carry. Until one day, my therapist reached up to a shelf, pulled down a book on the Enneagram, flipped to a page, and read aloud the profile of a “Performer.” And there I was. As easy to summarize as a box of cereal: shiny on the outside, optimized for function, and emotionally fortified with 12 essential distractions. I wasn’t a mystery—I was packaging. And, it hit me: I didn’t have an emotional compass. I had a résumé.

If I had to carve one lesson into stone it would be this: If we can’t name what we feel, it owns us. It drives our decisions, hijacks our relationships, and reroutes us without our consent. Developing an emotional vocabulary is not “extra.” It’s essential. It’s not therapy-speak. It’s survival code.

Naming emotions is like learning the names of stars—suddenly, what felt like a black sky of chaos becomes navigable. We start to see patterns. Meaning. Movement. We realize, “Oh… that’s not anger. That’s unacknowledged grief dressed up in adrenaline.” Or: “That’s not boredom. That’s hunger—for purpose.” Without names, we default to numbing. Or rage. Or silence. But with names? We gain leverage. Power. Precision.

Think of it like this: emotions are nature’s diagnostic tool. They don’t always feel good, but they’re always telling us something worth hearing.

Three Emotions I Misunderstood Until They Rewrote Me

1. Loneliness

For me, it wasn’t just the absence of company. It was the presence of hunger—my soul’s ache for resonance. In a world that mistakes connection for notifications, loneliness was my psyche tapping me on the shoulder and whispering, “Get in the room with someone who sees you.”

It didn’t mean I was weak. It meant I was wired for communion. But I had spent decades wearing independence like armor. The truth? I wasn’t self-contained—I was starving for something deeper and didn’t know how to name it. The lesson here: Don’t romanticize isolation. It’s not grit. It’s starvation.

2. Grief

Grief is love with nowhere to go; it is the echo of attachment, still roaming the body, looking for a landing place. Grief is not the end of love. It’s proof it was real. After my father died, I handled it like a task list. Flights. Documents. Logistics. I thought staying composed was maturity. It wasn’t. It was numbness dressed up as control.

3. Boredom

Boredom felt dangerous—like I was somehow failing at life. So I kept moving, kept building, kept performing. But beneath the momentum was a quiet discontent I couldn’t name. It wasn’t burnout. It was something deeper: a part of me underused, untouched, ignored. Not exhaustion—neglect. Boredom, I’ve come to realize, is a signal. An invitation to go deeper, not faster. It’s the mind’s way of saying, “You’ve drifted from what matters.” And when boredom pairs with emptiness—it’s a placeholder. A cup, waiting to be filled. The question that keeps me honest is simple: “What am I empty of?” The answer, more often than not, points me back to truth.

Turns Out Feelings Don’t Expire

We are not productivity robots. We’re not brands. We’re not biohacked machines designed for optimization. We’re complex, feeling, flawed organisms navigating a brutally demanding world.

Patriarchy told us emotions made us weak. Hustle culture told us to outrun our pain. Legacy masculinity told us to armor up. But they were all wrong. Screw The Norms calls for something else: Feel. Translate. Act. That’s the roadmap.

Today, I’ve made different choices. I’ve felt the ache, translated what it meant, and moved—deliberately. At first I flinched. I froze. But then I listened. I let myself feel, let myself be seen. And I moved—deliberately, decisively. Not in spite of emotion, but because of it. I chose to rewrite old patterns. All the time guided by something I never used to trust: what I feel.

So, ask yourself—if your son or daughter had to inherit your emotional playbook, when they feel that ache in their chest or that silence in their throat—will they reach for distraction, or will they be able to name it?