Learning To Forgive the Man I Don’t Want To Be
Learning To Forgive the Man I Don’t Want To Be
Section 16 of Substack book edition
[I]f it’s liberation you’re after, and you’re not experiencing discomfort, liberation is not where you’re headed.
- Rev. angel Kyodo williams
When Sprout was born, I found new joy in the scent of my baby’s scalp, the moments spent snuggling and singing lullabies before afternoon naps, the mastering of motor skills, and the unfolding power of language. My voice rang with laughter, counseled patience, extolled congratulations, lulled with hushed calm, and wondered anew at the world’s complexity.
These voices still ring through me every day. They are me at my best.
But they are not my only voices.
“God damn it.”
My angry voice—the first voice in this book—showed up around the time Cub was born, as Sprout began to assert growing independence.
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
Though it was only one voice among the others, my angry voice took me by surprise, and at day’s end, no other voice resounded so strongly in my memory.
“Pick it up, now! All of it!”
My angry voice came during moments of frustrated transition, as when Sprout wouldn’t cooperate in leaving the house.
“Why is this taking so long?? We need to leave!”
It came when I felt called to protect baby Cub, who was old enough to smile but too small to navigate the physical intensity of Sprout’s desire to play.
“That’s too much!”
Later, my angry voice came when I struggled to balance multiple responsibilities at once, as when I tried to cook dinner while responding to conflicts between the kids in the next room.
“No, no, no, no! Separate now!”
And it came when, in the heat of the moment, my wife tentatively suggested ways I could approach things more effectively.
“No, you don’t understand!”
Each such spur was ordinary, predictable, and usually quite minor. And my wife was only trying to help me remember my better self.
So why was I reacting with such anger and inflexibility? Who the hell was this guy, this shadow me, who welled up within?
Years before either Sprout or Cub was born, I was in crisis. Anxious thoughts had hijacked my life, and no day was untouched by panic.
Before bed each night, I would stalk the house for as much as 20 minutes, checking the locks on exterior doors and the knobs on our gas stove. Even the slightest bit of free play in the position of a bolt or a knob, as is nearly inevitable, called me to check again. I’d open and close one door repeatedly, listening for the click of closing and deeming it inadequate, holding myself in contempt all the while for the nonsensical ritual.
At work, I’d read, re-read, and re-re-read finished emails before sending them—in my head and aloud, slowly and quickly—lest I overlook an embarrassing typo or gaffe. I knew each email was as good as I could make it, but I kept re-reading all the same.
I avoided driving at night as much as possible. A small bump on a neighborhood street—an unevenness in the concrete or a small pothole—could summon thoughts of a body crushed beneath my wheels. Part of me always knew, even in those moments, that no such accident had occurred. But that reasonable voice was pushed aside by bubbles of panic beneath my skin, straining to burst through to open air as from boiling water. I’d hold my breath; when I did breathe, I drew little air, as if my lungs had decoupled from my diaphragm.
In this anxious state, I’d drive around the block to revisit the bump, ostensibly so I could verify that, indeed, no accident had happened. I’d tell myself this was a reasonable and empirically-minded thing to do. But acting on my anxious thoughts only empowered them. Inevitably, while driving around the block, I’d feel another little bump in the road and feel compelled to investigate it, too. One bump produced another through an interminable logic, each cycle around the block yielding a new epicycle, until I had no choice but to give up and go home. But even when safely back home, my fears, invested now with great power, clung to mind. My spirit would churn at the risk—the risk!—that I’d made a mistake worthy of contempt: that I was not, in fact, a good and competent person who could distinguish a small bump in the road from an accident.
One night at home, I finally broke down in front of my future wife. Through tears, I told her I feared for my sanity.
She stood by me. Though my anxious thoughts mystified her, she did not turn away. Her love and steadfastness in the face of my personal struggles was nothing short of grace.
It took me some time—and another anxiety crisis—to find the right psychiatrist, but I eventually found one who specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy, and that’s when, with the aid of a new medication, I made real progress in navigating anxiety. My doctor and I took an inventory of the negative, distrusting thoughts that accompanied my rushes of anxiety. I learned to recognize those negative thoughts in the moment, note them for what they were, and counter them with other thoughts I’d rehearsed in therapy that honored my fundamental competence and kindness. We planned small actions or “challenges” I could undertake between sessions, to help me push back gently on my anxious thoughts in difficult areas of my life and establish surer ground for trusting myself.
The pragmatism of the approach appealed to me, and with practice, those anxious thoughts—those fears of making a mistake, of forgetting, of slipping up in a crucial moment—became, simply, thoughts. They lost their grip on me, and I learned to let them go in the moment and act more charitably toward myself.
Bit by bit, life became livable again.
When Sprout was born, I was delighted to discover that the old contexts for anxiety still held little power over me, even in the face of little sleep. I drove without fear, even with a baby in the car, and I didn’t stalk the house at night locking the doors about my growing family.
But I wasn’t prepared when my angry voice showed up. By the time Cub arrived, my wife and I were talking regularly about how I was yelling too much. The idea of becoming an “angry dad” terrified me. I didn’t know what to do.
My wife noticed a pattern in how my desperation mounted in the moment. With each repetition of a word like “stop” or a phrase like “we need to leave now,” my voice became more strident. Often, I repeated the words so quickly that Sprout scarcely had time to respond—a sure sign that my actions were driven by inner turmoil rather than objective assessment of the situation.
I also began to notice how my anger sprang from a queasy energy that bubbled beneath my skin, which I wanted desperately to banish in the moment.
Repetition. Panic rising beneath my skin. This was familiar.
Once I saw my anger in this light, I recognized it as the flailing of a man in the grip of anxiety. And I could see how my anger, though it masqueraded as a method to stamp out my inner churn, only deepened my pain and disconnected me from the people I cherished most—the people I needed if I was to recover a more charitable version of myself.
This recognition alone offered some practical benefit. It empowered me to tell Sprout and Cub wholeheartedly that my anger wasn’t really about them; that Daddy struggles sometimes with powerful feelings of anxiety; that even adults have to learn and re-learn how to take a deep breath and respond gently to negative feelings. That I was sorry.
But I also needed to do better and atone. I set out to make sense of the fears that underlay these new occasions for anxiety, so I might learn to regard them and myself with kindness rather than contempt. With my psychiatrist, I used the same cognitive-behavioral techniques to document and analyze my angry-parenting moments. I also took up mindfulness meditation, with an eye toward cultivating steadiness and curiosity toward my fears rather than being consumed by them in the moment.
I learned that two main thoughts underlay my anxiety during difficult parenting moments.
First, the thought of being incompetent as a stay-at-home dad, whether in my own eyes or my wife’s—that is, being a failure—terrified me. In education-speak, this is the pain of a “fixed” mindset that mistakes challenges in the present for enduring shortcomings of the self, as opposed to a “growth” mindset that recognizes the self as fundamentally capable and always learning. Thus, I also feared “getting caught” failing by others and being judged inadequate to my task and unworthy as a parent and a man.
Parenting had become, without my realizing it, my new scene for demonstrating competence. Having stepped away from professional life, I could no longer prove my value through workplace recognition, talks given, or earnings. At home, the quality of my interaction with my kids was the primary reward. So, when the vast energy and growing independence of my kids sometimes outran my creativity, and I simply didn’t know what to do, I held myself in contempt. When my wife offered a different course of action, I doubled down on whatever wasn’t working and insisted that I was in the right—after all, I was the primary caregiver, and she wasn’t. And my outer voice rose with the inner pain of my supposed worthlessness for caregiving.
Second, I feared I could not protect my kids. This fear could rise with surprising force, as when Sprout took unfair advantage over Cub, or when the kids persisted in testing their physical limits in unwise ways. Sprout and Cub needed guidance and creative redirection in those moments. The anger I sometimes offered instead was the misdirected pain of a “should-be” protector—more contempt directed toward myself.
These fears and the anger they summoned shook me: they represent the opposite of who I hope to be as a dad and a man. I’ve never wanted to be the guy who strives for control and compliance; who must embody competence with every step; who tries in vain to bury his vulnerabilities rather than learn through them; who would claim protective dominion over his loved ones instead of honoring and helping to cultivate their intrinsic dignity and power. Not only have I never wanted to be that guy, but as a stay-at-home dad, I’ve hoped explicitly to challenge those same ideas about manhood and fatherhood.
To be fair to myself: the vast majority of the time, I was exactly the kind of dad I wanted to be. The dad who is patient. The dad who is fascinated by his kids’ evolving perspectives and invites them into dialogue. The dad who revels in surprise and knows his kids will teach him at least as much as he teaches them. The dad who learns through his vulnerability, especially at the hands of his kids.
I am most alive with Sprout and Cub precisely when I am learning, whether with them or on their behalf. And there is no adaptive learning without vulnerability. You don’t get one without the other.
In his 1934 book Art as Experience, philosopher and educational thinker John Dewey writes:
Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—either through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed. If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives.
Dewey does not use the words “learning” or “vulnerability” in this passage, but these are exactly what’s at stake. In other writings, Dewey describes such moments of falling out as problems that violate our expectations and challenge us to respond meaningfully. These are the wellspring of learning, provided we engage them in a spirit of curiosity and inquiry and have the courage to make something new of ourselves.
I now see parenthood, in part, as loyalty to learning, through countless situations wherein I am both responsible for the nourishment of my children and deeply vulnerable at their hands. As soon as I think I’ve got it together, a new challenge emerges, and I’m a novice yet again, uncertain of how to respond and, often, surprised by my first reaction. These are the moments that test my capacity for mindfulness; for dwelling in the discomfort of not knowing what I’m doing; for allowing a new version of myself to emerge, just around the corner, with trust that my bond with my kids will be stronger as a result. This journey is the very meaning of love.
Dewey counsels that “the live creature adopts its past; it can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness.” Thus, the future becomes “not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.”
When I am in right relationship with my kids, I act with the understanding that they are walking, breathing halos of promise, and so might I be as well.Making friends with my stupidities means cultivating mindful awareness of when and how the shadow of patriarchal masculinity passes over me. My shadow me, the voice that rises and holds me in contempt with hardened heart, is not interested in inquiry or transformation. It doesn’t seek to learn. It wants to stop time and return to a moment when I felt more secure—and it can’t.
By hearing that voice in a wider and more generous context, I discern the need that lies beneath: to know that I am essential and needed, here and now. And I can only meet that need by turning toward my loved ones and nourishing our connection.
Looking back, I now recognize how this same shadow has lurked at the heart of my personal struggles for a long time. For example, my fear of making a deadly mistake—the one that called me to circle neighborhood blocks repeatedly in my car—can be understood as fear of failure most terrible and the utter opposite of a man who protects others. But the shadow loomed long before that.
Depression first got its hooks into me in high school. I remember berating myself in front of the bathroom mirror one morning. My father overheard me as he walked down the hall, and he stopped and stuck his head into the room. From the doorway, he counseled that condemning myself was not a helpful thing to do, no matter what might be weighing on me. I think I nodded—but the thoughts remained.
Depression became more disruptive in college, and I entered therapy for the first time. During graduate school, I lost a job as a summer camp counselor because of depression. It started that summer with breaking into tears while driving home from work, forcing me to pull over to the side of the road. When I felt my inner turmoil beginning to affect my work, I opened up to one of my bosses, and soon I couldn’t stop crying in the camp office. My bosses, wanting to support me but needing to safeguard the quality of care at their summer camp, sent me home to rest. A couple of days later, they invited me to a local coffee shop, where they handed me a check for the remaining weeks of the summer and told me when and where to show up for a therapy appointment they’d arranged on my behalf. This was an incredible thing for them to do, for which I’ll always be grateful.
But even after that humbling experience, I still believed I could, eventually, move beyond depression through willful resistance to the ebb and flow of my moods. I would never, I told myself, take medication, as this would signify personal failure. I kept faith with my therapy appointments. I hoped these conversations would help me fashion a new stance toward myself—an “observing ego,” as my therapist put it—that would empower me to recognize patterns of depression in the moment and re-engage with the world rather than withdraw. But it wasn't easy for me to translate therapy room insights into new practical responses during the rawness of the moment. The pendulum between crash and recovery kept swinging at its own pace.
I was in a stable period when my wife and I met. We moved in together one year later, into a little duplex unit where we could get a puppy. I was still a graduate student at that time, so while she was at work each weekday, I spent long hours in the library or writing at the kitchen table, and depression seeped back into my life.
One night, while my future wife was in the kitchen, I sat on the bathroom floor with the door closed, thinking about hurting myself. She had no idea.
My back was leaned against the sliding-glass door of the tub, when an image came to mind. I imagined throwing an elbow back through the glass, picking up one of the resulting shards, and cutting myself with it.
The image was over-wrought, impractical, and wildly indiscreet. It almost certainly wouldn’t have worked out as envisioned. But the intention behind it and the contempt for myself that lay beneath held me for a very long moment.
Then I thought about the woman I loved in the next room, and the callousness of my self-harm fantasy horrified me. I imagined her hearing the sound of breaking glass, calling out my name and running to me, and finding me bleeding or worse.
I could never do that to the woman I loved—or at least, because I loved her, I knew I needed help to be the man who would never do that. I also knew I needed to move beyond my romantic, manly bullshit about the dignity of suffering and salvation through will. As my therapist at the time had once admonished, I needed to “get out of my own head,” and the journey to do so began with turning toward the woman I loved. It wasn’t just about me anymore, finally: my connection with her was more important than any dead idea about what recovery “should” look like. Taking responsibility for that connection meant allowing it to lead me somewhere new.
I came out of the bathroom and told the woman I loved that I needed help. Then I emailed my therapist for an appointment and asked about next steps for medication. This was only a beginning: the disorienting crush of anxious and obsessive thoughts was still to come. But beginning again is essential for taking responsibility for oneself and one’s relationships.
That was more than 15 years ago. Today, I have no doubt: I am who I am today because I turned toward the woman I love rather than into myself, and because she did not turn away. Sprout and Cub are the cherished embodiment of that turn and the love that deepened therein. Their being is all the proof I need: learning through vulnerability in relationship is the lifeblood of a sustainable, meaningful, and joyful manhood and fatherhood. By opening toward my children rather than contracting into myself, we grow together in connection and freedom.
Today, much of the time, I know my shadow—the man I don’t want to be—for who he is. I understand more about the fears that drive him and the occasions when he speaks in my ear. I’m learning to recognize him in the moment, smile at him kindly, and invite him to walk a different path, toward the man and father I want to be.
This is painful work, and learning to forgive myself, whether in the moment or in retrospect, is a slow and fitful process. Only recently, while undertaking a meditation on forgiving others, I remembered the scene that opens this book, wherein I lost my temper over a mess in Cub’s bedroom, and Sprout held me accountable for coming back to myself. Queasy heat flooded my chest and neck with the memory, my eyes filled with tears, and a choked sob escaped my throat, and I knew: I had not forgiven myself. I sat with that unease hot in my torso, and I began to notice the parts of my body that were not flooded with heat. I found my breath again, the continuous column of air moving always through the center of my being. I understood: my unease, however compelling it might feel upon arrival, is but one changing fraction of my experience. I have the capacity to recognize and hold that unease in the moment and accept it for what it is without becoming consumed by it. I can regard myself and my loved ones kindly and choose curiosity instead of armor.
Fatherhood is learning.
I do this work because it’s right and sustainable. I do it because I want Sprout and Cub to know: it’s OK to be honest about your vulnerabilities and growing edges with the people you love. In fact, it makes things easier for all involved. Everyone is working on something.
I want them to know: it’s OK to not know what you’re doing sometimes. There’s no avoiding it, and you get to learn something new.
It’s OK to ask for help, because no one thrives alone.
It’s OK to change your mind and begin again when you know you can do better, be kinder, and be gentler, especially when the people you love are depending on you. This is the root of responsibility.
It’s OK to feel anger. Everyone does. But when anger does come—and especially when it threatens to alienate you from the people you love and teach all the wrong lessons—take the time to calm yourself. Listen for the vulnerabilities and the needs that sparked your reaction. Don’t judge yourself harshly, but do commit to learning. And though you may need some time alone, don’t keep your loved ones at arm’s length for long. Come back. Reach out. Pull us close, especially when you are vulnerable. Apologize if you need to, and take wholehearted steps to repair any damage. Atone through wiser action. We will restore each other.
And I want Sprout and Cub to remember, always: you deserve your full humanity. You deserve it from your family, from your friends, from your partners, and especially from yourself.
This is love and learning in relationship—and for me, the core of a joyful masculinity worth living.
An early version of “Learning To Forgive the Man I Don’t Want To Be” first appeared in STAND Magazine, Issue #9, Summer 2018.
Rev. angel Kyodo williams, in Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, by Rev. angel Kyodo williams and Lama Rod Owens with Jasmine Syedullah, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2016, pg. 175.
John Dewey, Art as Experience (The Later Works, Vol. 10: 1934), Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, pp. 19–20.
Ibid., pg. 24.