The respect of men in anticlimatic

I can’t convey in words how surprised I am with how much I enjoy my job, this holiday season in particular. Now that I have had a couple years of more or less routine to get me off the panic bus of too much learning, too fast. It’s mostly just a driving game- motoring around from house to house in this small beautiful community in my highly augmented, well supplied, well tuned moto-craft.

40% of the people and vehicles I pass throughout the day wave to me. Some I know, some mistake me for one of my brothers. Fingers on steering wheels in oncoming traffic are constantly flipping vertical right before I pass them, giving me nano-seconds to reciprocate. Sometimes I don’t make it, and I hope they forgive me.

I feel like I’ve hit the sweet spot in life when I have eclipsed all of my fellow men in ability and self assuredness. Not all, of course- perhaps not even most- but a sum to the degree that never do I feel beneath anyone in society, where once I might have.

I used to be intimidated by authority figures- like teachers, police officers, government officials, parental figures, etc- and then I learned they were actually in the bottom 40% of overall human competence due to their need for control, and could be disregarded so long as they could be avoided.

I used to feel intimidated by working class men too. I was a white collar guy with baby soft hands and a child’s intolerance to the slightest physical discomfort. I knew they were tougher than me, as a man always knows, and that in many ways I was naturally subservient. Now, I’ll gladly whistle dixie in 18 degree caves with a pickaxe and a blowtorch, and these same men will remove their hats and step aside when I approach to rescue them.

I simply cannot describe the level of satisfaction in that transformation.

My dad was a man’s man, and my mother was a girl’s girl.
My mind ended up split right down the middle.
Father, Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.

I am very much a man’s man like my dad was, but I have always had a massive open wound for a heart to go along with that, and as any man in this world can tell you- there is no mercy spared for sensitive men. Which can be a good thing for emotional regulation, so long as the persistent struggles of life can be shaped into growth.

It’s one or the other- either an attack teaches you to hate the type that did it, or to empathize with the type that had it done to them. Or both, I suppose. The murky path of growth.

I’m usually pretty quick in my interpersonal exchanges. Especially in business, with customers and such. I’m polite, but I know how to leave a room. But with some men, occasionally customers, but more typically other workers I share a trench with, I find myself in no hurry whatsoever. I love these men. I wouldn’t tell them that (unless we had been friends for a decade or two), but I like to think they can feel it when we commiserate.