The version of strength you were handed was never yours.

Toxic masculinity gets talked about as a cultural problem, which it is, but that framing keeps it at a distance. The more specific version of it is a set of rules you absorbed before you had words for them. Anger was fine. Need wasn't. Softness cost you. Asking for help was a kind of failure. Strength meant not requiring anything from anyone.

Those rules work well enough in certain contexts and at a significant long-term cost. The cost shows up in relationships that can't go deep because depth requires showing something. In a specific kind of exhaustion from always being fine. In the distance between who you are around other people and who you are when you're alone.

I grew up in South Africa, inside a culture with a very specific and rigid picture of masculinity. I've done my own work on what I absorbed from that and what I chose to keep. The racism that was ambient in the culture I grew up in, absorbed without asking. The version of strength I inherited that turned out to mostly be about not needing anything. I'm not approaching this from the outside.

The men I work with on this are at different places. Some are in relationships where something isn't working and they can feel their own unavailability even if they can't name it. Some are going through a significant transition — a divorce, a coming out, a career change — and the old script stopped working. Some are just tired of the performance and ready to figure out what's under it.

This work doesn't involve convincing you that your masculinity is wrong or that softness is the goal. It involves being honest about what the current rules cost you and what you'd build if you actually had a choice. Most men find that what they want is simpler than expected. The capacity for directness, for real connection, for being known. Those aren't soft things. They're just not things the script ever left room for.