Becoming a man

This is a lovely and heartbreaking essay on the journey to be a better kind of masculine.

From the article:

We are all contradictions. We are all doubling as ourselves. Lynette and I doubling as queer and straight now. I am doubling as someone who only ever felt like a boy and a man but knows viscerally the harsh realities of living as a girl and a woman. I love my father in some abstract way, and I can’t be near him.

I see all the flaws of men, all the ways their fragility makes them dangerous and powerful and dismissive and sure that they know it all, and I love being a man. I love masculinity, and I love hanging out with men. My body is a contradiction. I feel a fiery rage toward men for treating me like a woman, for making women seem crazy and emotional and inferior, for what men did to me. I feel so much joy living in a man’s body, my natural physicality, and I am trying to find a path toward becoming a good man.