Yin/Yang

I want to talk about the falling of the masculine.

I have always had a difficult time relating to women who were man-haters. In the home I grew up in, I often witnessed the toxicity of the feminine and the wisdom of the masculine. For the majority of my youth, my father, not my mother, was a safe space. In my most frightening of years into adolescence and teenage era, I was found to constantly be a burden to my mother; we fought daily (if we were even talking to each other at all) and there were several comments made to me or about me that made my relationship with her become more strained over the years.

My father, on the other hand, was used to emotional outburst (as my mother never found it useful to hide any of her emotions as they came and went) and was often the voice of reason and presence when suffering one of her spirals. He very much become a safe space to fall apart in front of... as long as my mother was not present to voice to the room her distaste for his love for me and her feelings of unfairness that my thirteen-year-old emotions were being handled with more care than her fifty-three year old ones were.

It was many years later, long after my dad had passed away and even a few years after my mom as well, when she and I had spent her last months together, spending each waking moment with each other and slowly mending the parts of the past that could be mended. Years after her passing, hearing other friends gently unravel there childhood wounds in front of me, I noticed I was the only one to note having bruises and old scars healed over that were fingerprints of my mother. Everyone else attributed their own to their fathers. Hearing my married friends speak on how their husband was the only good man in their life and was healing long years of infliction by toxic masculinity, made me start to realize how intrinsic the wounds by men were. What was often labeled quickly as simply feminine rage or man-hating, was the same wounds and pain as mine often were, but from the other side of the coin.

From the yang. I don't want to be misunderstood. I had wounds by men as well (just as those who grew up with cruel fathers also experienced a life where women could also cause pain). I endured the deepest pain man could cause when I was still a child, having spent the first eight years of my life, repeatedly molested and assaulted by my fathers friend before the mask slipped long enough for the truth to come out and for him to be sent away for a few years in prison, and forever excommunicated from the community I grew up in. However, the men in my life that were meant to be protectors, often were.

And perhaps the darkness around those first several years of my life shined a better light on the kindness of masculine men, I can't say... But I realized a few years ago how stories of generational trauma were often my friends breaking free from their fathers and brothers. The protectors and so called providers of the groups... It was not that they had encountered only negativity from men, as I could often seen portrayed in the boyfriends and husbands they choose, but it was that their first experience of violence came from the people who portrayed themselves to be protectors. And nothing is truly more frightening than that.

It does have a similar distrust it leaves inside you; with your own masculinity or femininity. It has you second-guess everything that would evolve as the best version of yourself. Every time you try and do something strong, you wonder if you are becoming hard. Every time you try to protect, you wonder if you are becoming controlling. Every time you try to lead, you wonder if you are taking up too much space. Every time you try to nurture, you wonder if you are making yourself small.

And perhaps this is part of what we are witnessing now in the falling of the masculine.

Not the destruction of men. Not the rejection of masculinity. But the collapse of our collective understanding of what healthy masculinity actually is.

When the masculine has been associated with violence, domination, emotional absence, control, or the unquestioned authority of the provider, it makes sense that people would begin to distrust it. And when enough people have been hurt by the very person who was supposed to protect them, they may begin to believe that protection itself is dangerous.

But protection is not possession.

Strength is not domination.

Leadership is not control.

Provision is not entitlement.

And emotional steadiness is not emotional absence.

The healthy masculine does not ask the feminine to become smaller so that it can feel powerful. It creates enough safety for the feminine to become fully alive. And perhaps the same is true in reverse. The feminine does not need to destroy the masculine in order to be free.

Nurturing does not mean tolerating harm. Compassion does not mean the absence of boundaries. Feeling deeply does not mean that every feeling must become someone else's responsibility.

We need both.

An idea I was brought up around at a very young age: that for a community to thrive, we need both the healed masculine and healed feminine. But what took me years to realize, was that we also need both those aspects inside our own ecosystems as well to thrive as humans. We need the part of us that can hold, and the part that can soften.

The part that can say no, and the part that can say come here. The part that builds the walls around the village, and the part that tends the fire inside it.

Protector and nurturer.

Boundary and compassion.

Strength and tenderness.

Yin and yang.

So how do we shift the tides? I believe in healing ourselves and making peace with both energizes inside us; the yin and yang.

Masculine and feminine.

Protector and nurturer.

We stop asking which one is good and which one is dangerous, and instead learn to recognize what each looks like when it has been wounded—and what each can become when it is healed.

We learn to hold ourselves accountable without making ourselves monsters. We learn to recognize where we have caused harm without believing that harm is all we are capable of. We continue to chase after the moments when we succeed, not because we are perfect, but because we are capable of becoming better.

Reconciliation and balance.

With each other.

With ourselves.

And we let that work spread out into our families, our friendships, our communities. We do the hard work, and stay compassionate (which is an aspect of both the masculine and feminine), and pray for an era of peace. Love always, Niah B