Soft Men: On Being Male, Age Regressing, and Surviving the Suspicion

I have a stuffed dog. His name is Rudy. My wife bought him at a truck stop outside Macon. I was thirty. I cried. Not sad tears. Relief tears. Nobody had ever given me something soft before. Not like that.

I'm a drummer. I build furniture from reclaimed oak. I've been married almost ten years. And I age regress. That last part makes people stop. Their face shifts. Something behind the eyes closes. They're running a calculation.

The Look

You know the look. A woman with a stuffed animal is healing. Quirky. A man with one is suspect. The silence does the work. The pause before they change the subject.

I learned to hide early. Florida suburbs in the eighties. Boys weren't supposed to need things. I needed a lot of things. I was falling apart and had no language for it. I started cutting at fourteen. Long sleeves. Mouth shut. The routine.

The hiding and the softness got tangled up in each other. Still are some days.

What It Actually Means

It's not weakness. It's not threat. It's survival. It's what happens when the noise has been too loud for too long and your nervous system needs something that doesn't ask anything back. Rudy doesn't judge. Doesn't ask questions. He just sits there and lets me hold him.

I've been drumming since I was twelve. That's outward. That's the energy going somewhere. The softness is the other side. The rest between measures. You can't hit the drums for thirty years and not need somewhere quiet.

The Rule

Men don't get to be soft. That's the rule. Unwritten but enforced. A man who needs comfort is dangerous. A man who shows vulnerability is either weak or calculating. There's no third category. No box for a man who just needs to feel small sometimes. Needs to hold something. Needs to not be the strong one.

They lied about what men do. Men cry. Men cut themselves. Men need help. I did all three. Still here. Still a man. More of one than the people who made the rules.

The Baker Act

I was sixteen when I called my oldest friend because I was scared. The cuts went deeper than I meant. He came. He helped. He told my parents. He was right to tell. I know that now. But what came after. The locked unit. The shoelaces they took. The drumsticks they took. The parents who checked my arms like a crime scene. I learned something I'm still unlearning.

Telling the truth is how you lose control.

That lesson doesn't leave. It just gets quieter. On good days I can barely hear it.

Georgia

I met my wife in my late twenties. She's from a small town a couple hours from Savannah. Her family is enormous. Uncles on the porch. Aunts in the kitchen. Cousins with new babies. They absorbed me. Not politely. Wholly. I'm in the group texts. Expected at Sunday dinner. The kids call me Uncle Travis and mean it.

Nine years now. Nine years of being loved by people who had no reason to love me except I married in and that was enough. I've never had that before. Still learning to trust it. Rudy sits on the dresser. Nobody in this family has ever asked me to explain him.

To the Man Reading This

If you're a man with a stuffed animal. A comfort show. A younger self you keep private. If you've been hiding something soft because the world told you men can't be soft. I need you to hear something.

The rule is a lie. It was always a lie. You're not broken. You're not dangerous. You're not less of a man. You're just a person who found a way to survive and that way happens to be soft. That doesn't make you weak. It makes you smart. It makes you resourceful. It makes you someone who figured out what you needed and found a way to get it in a world that told you not to need anything.

I still play drums. I still have hard days. I still have Rudy. All three of those things are true at the same time. They can be true for you too.

— Travis

About the Author

Travis is a drummer, a woodworker, and a survivor of the Baker Act. He lives in Georgia with his wife and her enormous, welcoming family. He still plays music and still has hard days. Both things are true.