I have never felt comfortable in my own skin as a male. My consciousness has never simply implied to me that I am a man; the learning of being such in such state was learned and superimposed upon myself. It is strange to think that even I am a product of society.

The expectations thrust upon me by society have been overwhelming and contradictory. On the one hand, I was raised by the Mormon Church to be a well-respected vessel of God with a commitment to a gospel I found as transparent as a white sheet. The other hand pulling on my life was that of the world. The world demanded that like the church I be a “Man”, that I represent the imperviousness of a rock, the unbreakable spirit of a prophet, and carry the illusion that I am the chosen one; a white man. I held privilege because of my gender, but why exactly no one ever told me.

For all I knew, I was this object walking around waiting for someone else to tell me what I was supposed to be. The prayers didn’t bring anything but an abysmal silence that surrounded me in the dark. The questions I asked others earned me the same result. The two institutions of church and state of society did however have a great and profound clash within me.

The world outside the church washed across me like rapids corroding a boulder, proving that even rocks are not impervious. The raging river of the world wore away at my skin; I am to be tough, yet sensible, my body is an object dispensable for brute force, I am to be competitive, brutal, yet soft, my feelings do not exist to be displayed, yet they are there nevertheless to be bottled. This stoic notion did not adhere well to my skin, because I felt as if I had no right to lateral space. I felt enclosed, shy, and unable to reach out and take authority of this space around me, because of a hesitation I possessed with my environment and the environment and myself. What linked me to my environment? According to everyone else, what linked me ultimately was my state of maleness. And to make that state all the more arbitrary were the rules of masculinity. Actions must be performed within boundaries, as must thoughts. Why must everything be split into gender ideals, where navigation between one and the other becomes dangerous to how others are able to categorize us in their mind?

The church laid upon me the belief that I am a battleground, an object, between the forces of evil and good. Thoughts were not exactly just that of my own, but that of Satan’s and God’s. If I thought of sex or touched myself in a sexual manner, I was partaking in evil. This crippled the intentionality of my consciousness, as I found that I was not a free agent with natural thoughts to explore and maintain, I was a vessel- an object. The church was the first institution, though not the last, to deny my subjective state of consciousness. It was clear I was too be molded into an objective subject, a contradiction in itself.

In society, “be a man” was the battle call of my youth every coach, teacher and parent yelled to me when I stepped outside the boundaries of what they accepted of masculinity. If I did not want to fight the boys down the street--"Be a man, and just do it," someone yelled. Even my mother once pushed me out the front door and told me to go fight. I didn’t know what to be a man was, or what just "to do" so I went out and suffered a humiliating defeat in hand-to-hand combat at the age of nine. Am I a man now?, I wondered wiping the blood from my face. The feelings that arise in and after physical trauma are intense--protect yourself, run--oh, but I cannot, I must fight if I am to be what they desire me to attain to.

What became of my gentle sensibilities? I hope they only retreated under the attack, waiting for a peaceful moment in which to rise again. Strangely enough fighting all the boys I did helped them to like me. That is not to say we did not fight anymore, because we did. Fighting amongst boys was almost an aberrant form of communication. In each fist thrown, we discussed frustration, each elbow to another’s eye was a wish for power over our lives, and each knee to the face explained our wish to dominate this game of masculinity and become somehow impervious as was the model described to us.

By the age of twelve, I had been in more bloody fistfights than are required to be a professional boxer. I even had a few of my own moves to date. I went in for the headlock, and when achieved, I kneed the other in his face until he gave in or collapsed. Violence from the age of seven was my bodily experience. We played sports, I suppose, but they were only a warm up for the fights to follow.

The problem is that pain is invisible. You can see the reaction on a person’s face, but only if they show it. So what is pain when there is nothing visible, if there is no picture to express it, what is a hurricane in a jar?

Bringing me down was a simple escapade for the word. I had no manual for operating this vessel I had been “blessed with”. I only knew I could feel colors like pain, shadows brought insight into how weak and powerless I felt. Jam another lesson they taught me down my throat, take another gospel, another hint of advice from those who where the wiser, and try to help it mold me.

As a budding man I felt reclusive in my actions. I didn’t throw like the rest of the boys, I didn’t ride fast and dangerously on my bike like I was supposed to, and I didn’t like to steal. It was the Mormon in me that resisted all those “temptations of the devil”. But I could not hold onto my gentle sensibilities and survive amongst the herd I followed in the neighborhood and at school. Living in a lower class neighborhood and going to an upper class church were pulling in two different directions, though both were consistent in their inscrutable exhortation to create a certain type of “man” from me.

This conflict of interest between which side I should choose to mold my ‘manhood’ from came to a close at the age of thirteen. I had just moved to Georgia and started at yet another new school. Your identity is always threatened in new environments. I had chosen to follow the church, and be the man in a patriarchal society. I was a man of God. I was to be the head of the family; I held privilege over the women and children. The idea was strangely unsettling that I was to be in charge just because I was male, but who was I to argue with the institution of God? I walked that line as far as I could go. I prayed with no answer, I listened to the prophet, obeyed even when my heart yelled otherwise. Then one day I changed my mind.

Change was not so easy for me as it is not for anyone else. It took the grinding of the gears, the flowing of the current to wear away enough of me to create what was needed--what was required of me. And as songs of melancholy played all around me, I fell into the harmony. As I screamed at God for something, and begged of society for the same--anything--I met nothing but myself. But that was not enough, just me.

In the end, as always, it was the others that helped me change my mind. I was standing out in the recreation area after lunch at school when eight eighth graders jumped me. I was being punished for being a “wimp”. I had not lived up to the promise of the budding man, I kept to myself, I did not “stand my ground”, so they kicked me until I was unconscious. The boys were not disciplined, the principal told me later as we sat in her office. They had just been “screwing around”. I had brought too much attention to myself being the new kid. I needed to learn to stand up for myself she told me. I knew she was right, if I was to survive this little world I lived in I had to play the game. I understood this line of communication. I am man, I fight.

Despite the inadequacies I felt in my body I acted as “man”. The available space around me was restricted by my shyness. The difference in being a man is that I must be ready to react to anyone threatening that sense of space. I need to morph from a human being, a feeling young person, into an object built of instruments for battle. How exactly was I to do that?  And the answer was simple: I was to just do it.

But do what?, I screamed to myself as I laid in my bed at night waiting for that epiphany.

There is no training for the young budding man. Every answer is “just do it”, you are a man. What an exploration. The answer is to be found within me? Inside is only un-masculine nagging thoughts, hate is on the way, rage, pain must be re-gifted. The answer is, I must just do it. What is it? Fight back. Even my parents turned their backs on me, and shrugged their shoulders. Even my church elders only could pat me on the back and offer me weak advice in regards to doing what is right. But, what is the right action for a “person” who cannot act as they want? What avenues was I left with to express my buried frustration, depression, suicidal thoughts, and unease?

So, I am to be a man? This person alone in a room scared of his own thoughts. I own all this space, but I must fight for it, I must declare it. I went to school the next year, found him who was at the top of the heap of those that had offended me and attacked him without warning. He never saw me coming. The battle was empowering, validating, and yet sickening. Before I knew what had happened, the other teenage boy lay under my feet in the fetal position. I stood over him, my fists clenched, bruised and victorious. He looked up at me as if I was God himself. That fear in his eyes, I recognized as a mirror image of my own. I never wanted to be on the other side of that mirror again. I am man.

Anger, violence, conflict, the threat of violence are modes in which I operated in. Damn school, another battle ground. Every new school is another war. How do I top myself, how do I top that man over there. Fighting doesn’t work, sometimes I loose. The world must know I am not only “the man” but a man as well. I must fall away from these long nagging thoughts that beg me to find myself and quit this game, but what use does the world have for an individual?

That is when I found my gun, a 45. She was so beautiful that gun, carrying all the promises in the world. No one could stop me now. Just me and my 45. It no longer mattered that I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, that I feared others, that I wasn’t sure about myself, that I had been expelled from school for fighting, that I didn’t know love, that I turned my back on God, and that I had no hope for the future. I had a gun, and I was a big man. My friends asked me--no, they challenged me--what I was going to do next. I don’t know, but whatever I’m just going to do it.

And I did, I showed them. I walked right into that restaurant and pulled out my 45--that extension of my anger, frustration, self-hatred--and demanded money. They feared me, all of them. I was man, and I had the power just as the church and the world had said I had. I raced around the restaurant waving my big gun until my ego was satisfied. I was seventeen.
The police arrested me the next night, but I didn’t care. You can not break me, I am impervious. Not even the sound of the judges gavel hitting his desk could break. And as he read off the verdict of six years to be served in the Oregon Department of Corrections, I did not flinch. You cannot break me. You cannot destroy what you have created, or maybe they could, and maybe that is what I feared so much. I recoiled at the thought of all this, all I had collected in light of myself would be taken away. Maybe none of it makes any sense, or maybe it is perfectly clear, or maybe it exists in both extremes.

I had crossed an invisible line somewhere from becoming a man to being a man, and was now being punished for it. It hurt, I will admit that now. It hurt to have spent my whole life trying to live up to everything I had been shown to be only to have the hammer come down on me so sharply.

Prison--the reeducation of men? Would the culture of punishment save me? I can’t say that I exactly knew what to expect of prison. I would not be free again until I was twenty-four. There was no time to worry, wonder, or think. Push everything down, and move forward. Just do it, get it done. I will certainly come out of this more a man, or dead.