Recently on my substack, I wrote an article on my Substack on how to recognize and work with Male Fragility. This article was prompted by reading a book called Grappling: From Fragile to Agile, where the author explores how fragility shows up in men and discusses ways we can become more agile instead of fragile. I’ve been reading this book while exploring my own areas of fragility so that I can become agile when I encounter them.
So what does fragility work look like?
Becoming agile with fragility involves recognizing the blind spots you have in your life that occur because of the way you’ve been socialized. Our socialization creates a bubble around our lives that can keep us from recognizing the experiences of other people, because all we can see is our own frame of reference. When you recognize the socialization and the bubble it creates, you necessarily will get really uncomfortable with what you see, because of how it may make you uncomfortable with yourself.
We have to lean into that discomfort. This is not easy to do, but it is necessary, if we want to grow as people and as men. For example, if I am looking at my fragility around being a heterosexual male, I necessarily need to get real with how my socialization as a heterosexual male causes me to ignore the realities of the experience that other people have faced where their sexuality and identity around sexuality hasn’t been accepted and welcomed because of how society at large is oriented toward that particular sexual expression. This is slowly changing, but this change is expedited when people who have fragility are willing to confront their own fragility and become agile because they can accept their discomfort.
Accepting our discomfort also means getting curious about other peoples’ experience, without expecting those people to educate us. We need to educate ourselves, which means we make the effort to learn about other peoples’ experience, listen to what other people are saying, and otherwise discover for ourselves what we don’t know.
If you’re a man reading this article, you likely have areas of your life where you are fragile. Maybe it’s around race or sexuality or spiritual beliefs or whatever else, but it behooves you to examine the areas of your life that you feel fragile around. Otherwise you are keeping yourself in a place that feels comfortable, but comes at the cost of awareness of other people. You can’t solve their problems and they aren’t looking for you to solve their problems. What is desired is awareness and ownership and a willingness to face what’s underneath our fragility, which is often the fears that we aren’t acknowledging around our fragility. Those fears come in the form of awareness that other people often make accommodations to keep some people happy or feeling safe at their own expense because of how we are socialized.
We become agile when we confront the aspects of ourselves that don’t want to see outside the bubble of our lives. If I never look outside that bubble, I might be in a for a rude awakening that I need to have so I can be fully present with the realities of what other people experience. Agility is acceptance of our own discomfort around the realities of life and our willingness to grow, learn and acknowledge the experiences other people have that are different from our own experience.
