The Man Show

Vol. 3, Issue 35

Like most kids growing up in the '80s, I was taught that the most important thing a young boy could hope to be when he grew up was Not a Pussy. And that could not be achieved if I went to some head-shrink to deal with my problems. Therapy was for the weak or the desperate or the divorcing – it was shameful. When I was very young and forced to go to family therapy a couple of times, it didn't feel like it was meant to help me but to teach me how to pretend to be normal. So it didn't stick.

It took more than two decades and lots of starts and stops for it to begin to work – and most of that progress has only been achieved in the past few years. If it works, it's a pretty grueling process.

My father was a constant topic in sessions. And with the last couple of therapists – including my current one – I couldn't talk about my dad in any sort of meaningful way. I was so angry at him, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. Most of the time I believed it was my fault for feeling so angry.

Ironically, stupidly, my father thought if he didn’t work as a middle manager for Ford, he would have made a very good therapist. He thought he was a great listener, but he was not, he was just exceptional at waiting for his turn to talk to offer an unwelcome, usually unkind opinion. After he retired he took some continuing education psych courses at the local community college just to see what it would take, but I think he got bored.

One of our last, most frustrating interactions on this subject happened seven years ago. I was in the process of raising money for a media startup, and my father was very much against the idea. To sum up: too risky. I tried to convince him I was ready to handle this, but instead, I made a clumsy unforced error and told him I'd started seeing a therapist again. This is how the rest of the conversation went:

Dad: Why are you seeing a therapist?

Me: I just have to work some things out. I want to be mentally ready for what's ahead.

Dad: But you're not ready. You're having mental problems. It's not the time to start your own company with other people's money.

For sure, he was hostile, and that company failed for many reasons, but of course, he knew it would.

Anytime I brought up my daddy issues, my therapist would be, like, “Well, why don't you just talk to him?"

That never happened, and since his dementia has accelerated, never will. I don't know if I would have ever been honest with him anyway – I was too afraid of what he'd say back.

*****

That brings us to this week's Really Good Shares episode. It features my friend, Cord Jefferson. I worked with him at Gawker in the bad old days, and then he left that company to go off and become a very successful TV writer. He's worked on, let's see, Succession, The Good Place, and last year he won an Emmy for his work on Watchmen. Cord's acceptance speech went semi-viral because he freaked out, went off-script, and thanked his therapist.

Cord also grew up with some unhealthy ideas about therapy. He had a stoic military father and a mother he adored but stayed guarded around. We talked for several hours about this topic:

"I've become really good at hiding my internal tumultuousness, in my head and in my heart. I did that because, you know, it was a bad lesson from my dad, but it's one that I took to heart, and one that I sort of got good at – if you're going to be a man, you shut up, and you keep a stiff upper lip, and you deal with it."

And by “deal with it," he means “don't deal with it." Stuff it all down. Ignore it. Rub some dirt on it.

While we were talking, I wanted to bring up this quote I heard from Jane Fonda. My wife once worked with her on a TV show, and one day on set, the discussion turned somewhat political, and I don't recall the exact context, but Jane's response was, "Masculinity is a disease we give to little boys." I wish I heard that 40 years ago. I mean, damn.

In the feature pit down below, we have reprinted the share Cord read on the podcast about his new appreciation and obsession with the song "The Man in Me" by Bob Dylan. If you listen to the episode you’ll also hear me mispronouncing words in a sleepy low-octave voice, and a version of TMIM performed by Jerry "Swamp Dogg" Williams, official musical director of TSB. Check it out and then please leave nice five-star reviews about it on iTunes so more people will listen to it. — AJD

Cracked Open

by Cord Jefferson

A friend told me once that you could have dinner with me and then realize after the bill had been paid that I knew everything about your life while you still knew nothing about me. Starting in childhood, I survived by obscuring whole swaths of myself from everyone I met, including my family, my closest friends, and my girlfriends. I did it on instinct, habitually deflecting or sometimes realizing after I'd already said something that it was a lie. I've strived my whole life to project an air of effortless perfection, and I was always secretly worried that if people knew I was flawed, they wouldn't like me anymore. This is such a clichéd problem to have that it pains me to even write it down like this for public consumption. As a writer by trade, there are few sins greater to me than unoriginality, yet here I am, another dude in his late 30’s telling you how it's difficult for men to be vulnerable sometimes. Sorry.

I heard the song "The Man In Me" dozens of times before the year 2020. It's one of the tunes played in The Big Lebowski. I've seen that movie maybe 30 times in my life, and not once was I moved by the music in it. In fact, I can't stand Bob Dylan. I don't like his mumble, and the stripped-down folk thing never moved me the way it did everyone else in my freshman dorm. I also don't like the way Boomers always try to convince you that he's the greatest American musician who's ever lived, but I guess I can't blame that one on Bob.

One day during quarantine, I fell down a Big Lebowski rabbit hole on YouTube and heard "The Man in Me" again. And this time, something stuck. I promptly found a video for "The Man in Me" and played it over and over and over again. And then I switched to Spotify, where I played it on repeat in my car, driving fast down Los Feliz Boulevard while singing the LA-LA-LAs with Bob.

This song reappeared at a particularly strange time in my life, in the middle of a global crisis, as I tried to figure out in various therapies, both individual and couples, how to be a better man, a better friend, better brother, a better partner. Everything seemed equally confusing, uncertain, and frightening, and I spent many hours listening to "The Man in Me" while lying in bed in my bathrobe. I didn't listen to the verses too closely, nor the full chorus, for that matter. I was mostly engrossed with one line: "To get through to the man in me." That line resonated -- there's a secret guy in Bob, one he keeps hidden away from the world. As someone who maintains his privacy so fastidiously that his own mother didn't know he had tattoos until he'd gotten 10 of them, I understood exactly where that line was coming from.

My mom died less than a year after she found out about my tattoos, and it's now my greatest regret in life that she passed without ever knowing who I actually was. She knew many parts of me, but she never knew the whole of me, because I didn't let her in, and now I can't let her in. To avoid making the same mistake twice, I've now started inviting my dad to join my therapy sessions, so he can be present while I puke out all my feelings and bad memories, and we can sift through the details together. In the last session, after we'd both cried, he said, "I'm sorry it took me almost 40 years to get to this place." My dad hates Bob Dylan, too, but I think he'd probably like that one song.

****

Deep dish! And remember to check out Cord’s RGS episode, too.