Office Hours

I don’t know why masculinity is everywhere all of a sudden.

All my timelines. Podcasts. My algorithms. Politicians, influencers, and self-proclaimed alphas have an opinion about what it means to be a man. Maybe it’s because we’re all getting older, softer, and lonelier. I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things.

A few weeks ago, two podcasters I’d met online, Nachi and Damaris from @unveilpod, asked me a question I couldn’t answer.

But before I tell you about that question, I have to admit something.

I’ve been seeing a therapist.

Actually, that’s not true. I’m seeing two therapists.

Maybe three. And I still don’t know exactly what the third one does. We mostly just talk.

And if you know me, you’re probably already laughing. Cause I don’t believe in therapy. At least, I didn’t. My default position has always been that therapy is for the weak. And I’ve always felt like the professionals doing the listening were looking for a way to weaponize whatever I said, or the way I thought. I’m a kid from the ghetto. A Marine. Devil Dog. An ex-cop and reformed felon. A retired boxer. I have a reputation to maintain.

At least that’s the story I love telling myself.

In the past, the VA paid for me to go to school, and now they’re paying for me to go to therapy. Apparently, they’re determined to educate me one way or another.

Left to my own devices, I never would’ve gone. But life has a funny way of volunteering you for things. Before I knew it, more than a year had gone by.

A lot of times, I feel like Tony Soprano sitting across from Dr. Melfi. Half of me wants to tell the truth. The other half wants to get up, tell everybody to go fuck themselves, and leave.

And I’m not saying I’m fixed.

Therapy and talking haven’t fixed me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be fixed. And to be honest, I don’t even know if I’m broken.

But I snapped the other day at work. I told one of the members to shut the fuck up and called her a bitch. She crossed a line with me. I crossed one too.

A couple of months before that, I called another member, a doctor, a punk-ass bitch. I think I even told him to suck my dick.

If there’s one thing that still gets under my skin, it’s feeling dismissed. Especially when I know I’m right. Twenty years ago, that feeling would’ve justified anything I did next. These days, I’m trying to learn that it doesn’t.

So no, I’m not sitting here pretending therapy has turned me into some enlightened monk.

It hasn’t.

I’m still learning how to live with the violence that lives inside me.

People see a shaved head, a goatee, my heavyweight frame, and the way I talk, the way I walk. They assume I’m just another meathead. A dumb boxer. An old vet.

I mean, I am.

I’m just a regular dude.

But I’m also not.

What they don’t see are the books.

The years I spent reading in prison.

The classrooms.

The pages I’ve written.

The mistakes I’ve survived.

I have letters after my name too.

For a long time, whenever I felt someone talking down to me, especially someone with an M.D. or an MBA after their name, I took it personally.

Like they believed those letters made them smarter than me.

For years, I felt like I had to prove they were wrong.

I’ve spent enough time living to know that wisdom and education don’t always travel together.

And for a long time, I confused education with intelligence.

Maybe they know more than I do in their field.

Maybe they don’t.

Either way, I’ve met enough brilliant people with no degrees, and enough educated people with no humility, to know those aren’t the same thing.

Sometimes I want to say, All that money, and some people still can’t buy class.

But that’s the old reflex talking.

Maybe that’s another thing I’m learning.

Not every battle is worth fighting.

For most of my life, I thought strength meant standing my ground.

Now I’m starting to think strength also means knowing when to walk away.

Maybe the strongest man in the room isn’t the one who wins every fight.

Maybe it’s the one who no longer needs one.

But in the middle of all that remembering, something unexpected started happening.

Other memories I hadn’t touched in more than twenty years started showing up without permission. Talking has helped me to remember more. Stories I thought I’d buried started introducing themselves again. My father’s voice. My mother’s hands. The streets I grew up on. The Marine Corps. The NYPD. Prison. My ex-wife. My wife. My kids. Pieces of myself that have been sitting in storage like a ghost under a dusty sheet.

Then, right in the middle of all that remembering, my phone buzzed.

It was Nachi and Damaris.

They wanted to know if I’d come on their show.

They wanted to talk about my writing, my childhood, and growing up Dominican in New York.

And then they asked the question.

“What does masculinity mean to you? How do you define it?”

I stared at the screen longer than I’d like to admit.

Because I didn’t know.

Not because I don’t think about being a man.

But because I’d never had to define it.

I don’t wake up wondering if I’m masculine enough.

I just am.

I’m the oldest of five boys.

I fought. I boxed. I joined the Marines. Had lots of sex. Became a cop. Went to prison. Became a father, again. Worked my ass off. Went to college. Worked my ass off some more. Lifted weights. Paid bills. Ran triathlons and marathons. Loved my children and wife harder than I thought was possible.

I’ve spent my entire life learning to be a man without ever stopping to ask what that actually meant.

Maybe that’s what surprised me.

Not that I couldn’t answer.

But that I’d never needed an answer before.

Since that conversation, I’ve been thinking about masculinity in a way I never have before.

Maybe that’s what all this talking is doing.

It’s not making me more emotional. I’m not emotional in that sense anyway.

But it’s making me more curious. I’m starting to question my past more.

With all the therapists and psychiatrists, I’ve been talking and thinking about the tinnitus that never shuts off, the anxiety that seems to come out of nowhere, the nights where sleep feels like a negotiation instead of a biological function. We talk about trauma. Hypervigilance. Stress. They have all these words for everything. Do I have PTSD even though I didn’t go to the war?

Somewhere between those appointments and that podcast interview, something clicked.

Not an answer. A connection.

I started thinking about my first marriage.

Then my second, and all the things in between.

I’m not interested in pretending I’ve figured this marriage thing out. My wife would probably laugh if I said that out loud. I’m still stubborn. Still impatient. Still convinced I’m more right more often than I actually am. “Yo soy el hombre, coño!”

I learned a lot from my father, but tenderness was not one of the lessons. Still, I’m a better husband today than I was twenty years ago.

A better father.

A better listener.

A better man.

Why?

Was it money? Sometimes I think it’s money.

I make considerably more now than I did during my first marriage. Financial stress can turn every conversation into an argument and every argument into a referendum on your worth.

Was it age?

Experience?

Prison?

The Marines?

Writing?

Fatherhood?

Therapy?

Who was I then?

Who am I becoming now?

Those questions have been following me around ever since that podcast interview.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking so much about my first marriage.

It would be easy to blame the youth. I got married young. We had a child young. We were trying to build a life while we were still trying to figure out who we were.

I remember throughout my first marriage, my lack of money and education had me feeling so impotent. I was a college dropout, making only $40,000 a year as a cop.

It would be easy to blame money. We were broke. Every bill felt like an emergency. Every unexpected expense felt like a failure. It’s hard to be patient when you’re scared. It’s hard to be generous when you’re counting dollars.

It would be easy to blame everything except myself.

But that wouldn’t be true.

The truth is, I didn’t know what kind of man I wanted to be because no one had ever asked me to think about it.

I knew what kind of man I wanted to look like.

Strong.

Dangerous.

Respected.

Capable of violence but also controlling it.

Capable of protecting the people I loved.

Those were the measurements I inherited.

Looking back, I don’t think I ever protected my family emotionally.

I can’t get one memory out of my head still. My ex-wife yelling at me.

“Fuck, Miguel, I can’t teach you to be a man…”

I can’t remember what it was that I did. Or didn’t do.

But it still hurts.

Back then, I don’t think I understood that those things counted.

Maybe they count more than everything else.

Today, when people ask me about masculinity, I realize they’re asking a different question than the one I’m trying to answer.

I’m not trying to define masculinity for everyone else.

I’m trying to understand what it has meant in my own life.

I can only tell you what happened to me. Somewhere between the Marine Corps, the NYPD, prison, fatherhood, marriage, education, writing, therapy, work, and groceries, my definition changed.

It isn’t my job to write a universal definition.

My job is to tell the truth about my own.

When I look at my marriage today, I see a different man.

But I’m still me.

I still lose my patience.

I still get defensive.

I still carry pieces of fighting, the Marines, the police department, and prison inside me. Some habits don’t disappear.

They just get quieter.

But I don’t measure myself the same way anymore.

I actually think I’m more masculine now than I’ve ever been.

That realization surprised me more than anything I’ve thought of lately.

Because if you had met me twenty years ago, you probably would’ve said I was more masculine then.

I was younger.

Stronger.

Angrier.

Quicker to fight.

More reckless.

More dangerous.

I had uniforms.

Guns and attitude.

From the outside, I looked like the definition of masculinity.

But I don’t think I was more masculine.

I was broke.

I think I was performing masculinity.

I wasn’t masculine when I was committing crimes. I wasn’t masculine when I wasn’t supporting my first family the way I should have been.

I wasn’t masculine when I confused fear with respect. I wasn’t masculine when the people who loved me had to survive me.

That wasn’t manhood. That was damage wearing a costume.

These days, my life looks different.

The other day my wife called me while she was driving home from work.

“Baby, when I get home, can you fill up my truck?”

“Yeah.”

No hesitation.

No sigh.

No feeling like it was one more thing somebody needed from me.

Just, “Yeah.”

Somewhere between driving to the gas station and squeezing the handle on the pump, I caught myself smiling.

Because I like doing things like that now.

I like making sure her tank is full before she has to take the kids to school the next morning.

I like stopping for milk because I know we’re almost out.

I like replacing things before they break.

I like paying the rent.

Sometimes I still can’t believe I bought my wife a truck.

Watching her drive away in it made me happier than buying anything I’d ever bought for myself.

Twenty years ago, I would’ve never imagined saying this, but buying my wife a truck feels more masculine to me than almost anything I used to call manhood.

Not because she needed me to.

Because I wanted to.

Because somewhere along the way, providing stopped feeling like a burden and started feeling like a privilege.

There’s a scene in the hood classic Dead Presidents that I’ve thought about for years. Right before Cutty puts a gun to Anthony’s lips and tells him to suck it, he says, “Hey, Young Blood, bringing in the groceries, huh? Lord have mercy. Man, I remember when I was married, I used to love to bring home the groceries, made me feel real good, like a man, know what I mean?”

Every time I see that scene, I smile.

Then I want to cry.

Because I get it now.

I’ve been the big bad Marine who couldn’t feed his family.

And now I love bringing home the groceries.

Twenty-three-year-old me would’ve laughed at forty-three-year-old me.

He would’ve thought groceries weren’t masculine.

He would’ve been wrong.

I love paying the bills.

I love knowing my children have what they need.

I love knowing my wife can exhale a little because I handled something.

Not because she can’t handle it herself.

But just because I can.

And because I should.

Because there is something deeply satisfying about providing without needing applause for it.

Nobody claps when you keep the lights on.

Nobody gives you a medal for paying tuition, filling the refrigerator, or making sure everyone has shoes that fit.

But there is a quiet pride in it.

A private pride. The kind of pride I only came to understand as a grown man.

Back when I was a boy, I thought masculinity had to announce itself.

Now I know that real masculinity is quieter.

Less performance.

More responsibility.

Less threat.

More shelter.

Less about proving I’m dangerous.

More about making sure the people I love don’t have to be afraid.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been learning all along.

Not how to be a man.

How to become a better human being.

Maybe that’s the answer I couldn’t give that day.

Not because I didn’t know what masculinity was.

Because I’m still becoming the man I want to be.

About the Author: Miguel A. Castillo Jr. is a Marine Corps veteran, former New York City police officer, boxing coach, and writer. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting at Manhattanville University, where he is adapting his memoir for film. His work explores masculinity, incarceration, fatherhood, race, and the institutions that shape identity. A Goldwater Fellow at NYU, he lives in New York with his wife and children and is at work on his first book, The Rogue's Gallery.