The work I do today grew out of a journey that began long before I knew what I wanted to do with my life. It emerged from my own struggles with belonging, emotional expression, intimacy, and what it means to be a man.
For much of my early life, I felt there was something about me that didn't quite fit. I spent years trying to find my place in the world, searching for a way to feel more comfortable in my own skin. Eventually, that search led me into men's work, where I began to discover something I had been longing for: a sense of belonging that didn't require me to hide the parts of myself I had learned to reject.
This is the story of how that path began, and why working with men has remained central to my life.
Growing up feeling different
I was raised in a household that nurtured certain values in me: creative expression, social equality, and a sense of responsibility for our impact on the planet. From an early age, I felt drawn toward a life that reached beyond the conventional expectations of success and belonging.
I was also a highly sensitive child. I suspect complications at birth may have contributed to the difficulty I experienced adjusting to the world, although I can't know that for certain. What I do know is that I often experienced things intensely, and my parents struggled to understand what I needed.
Compared with my two older brothers, I seemed to require a particular quality of attention and presence that my parents, despite their intentions to be loving and stable caregivers, didn't quite know how to offer. We often butted heads. Over time, I internalized a sense that I wasn't fully accepted as I was. Somewhere along the way, I began to believe that I was a problem, or that there was something wrong with me.
My experiences with peers reinforced that feeling. I was small, with big eyes and buck teeth that made me feel a little alien-like. My clothes, limited by my family's financial circumstances, didn't measure up to the fashionable standards of my schoolmates. I felt rejected, different, and perpetually behind some invisible standard I couldn't seem to meet.
By my teenage years, I had begun to turn that difference into a kind of rebellion. If I wasn't going to fit in, I would make a point of it.
I dyed my hair, pierced my ears, and immersed myself in punk rock and grunge. I began to find power in the identity I was creating for myself, even enjoying the shock it sometimes produced in the outside world. If I couldn't find a place within the existing social order, I could at least claim the freedom to define myself.
Looking back, I can see both the genuine creativity in that impulse and the protection it offered. There was freedom in expressing myself, but there was also a way of turning rejection into an identity I could control.
The grief I learned to hide
When I was fourteen, something happened that profoundly changed my family. My mother, who had struggled with deep emotional despair for years, decided to leave my father and move from New York to New Mexico.
It rocked my world.
I had assumed my family would remain intact. I had imagined my parents would always be together, and suddenly the stability I had taken for granted was gone.
The separation came at a vulnerable time in my adolescence. I was already navigating my sensitivity, my struggles with belonging, and messages from my father that had left me feeling ashamed of my natural emotional responses. Faced with the grief of my family's rupture, I made a conscious choice to suppress what I was feeling.
Part of me wanted to punish my parents by showing them I wasn't affected. I held everything inside and acted as though I was fine. The pain was so deep that I withdrew from my family, insulating myself from the possibility of being seen in my hurt. I didn't want them to know how much I was suffering, and I no longer felt I could trust them with my heart.
That response made sense to me at the time. It gave me a way to maintain some control when the people and circumstances I depended on felt beyond my control. But it also established a pattern that would follow me into adulthood: when I was hurt, I learned to hide it. When I needed connection, I often protected myself by withdrawing.
I didn't have the language for any of this then. I only knew that showing how much I felt seemed dangerous, and that keeping it to myself felt safer.
Seeking freedom through sex, drugs, and music
As I entered high school, my coping mechanisms expanded into sex, drugs, and alcohol.
I found some solace in friendships, and my older brother's more popular social standing helped me find acceptance within a social circle that appreciated my quirkiness. Alcohol helped me overcome the social shyness that had plagued me since childhood. Marijuana and drinking seemed to unlock a side of me that was silly, daring, and powerful.
For a while, these experiences offered a sense of freedom. I became more socially confident and began exploring my sexuality, having numerous encounters with girls and developing a strong appetite for novelty and variety.
But there was a contradiction in my experience. I could pursue sexual encounters with enthusiasm, yet whenever a connection began to move toward genuine intimacy, I often shut down and lost my attraction. I wanted the affirmation and excitement, but I struggled when someone wanted to know me more deeply.
I didn't understand the pattern at the time. I can see now how the desire to feel wanted can coexist with a fear of being truly seen.
During those years, I also began experimenting with psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA. These experiences could be profoundly expansive. They deepened the bonds within my social circle as we navigated New York City's underground rave scene, and they offered glimpses of dimensions of experience that seemed to extend far beyond ordinary consciousness.
Music became another essential outlet. I learned guitar, formed a band that included my older brother, and discovered a powerful sense of freedom through creative expression. I idolized bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, fantasized about becoming a rock star, and poured myself into writing songs and performing at parties and school dances.
In many ways, I believe music helped carry me through that period. The emotional pain I couldn't communicate directly found another route through the sound and feeling of the music we created.
It gave something inside me a voice before I knew how to give it one myself.
When the old ways stopped working
Toward the end of high school, the social world that had sustained me began to change. Many of my older friends moved away. The band broke apart and reformed, and my own critical nature and strong creative opinions contributed to the friction. I struggled to connect with girls in the ways that had previously given me a boost in self-esteem.
The drugs and alcohol were also losing their appeal. They no longer offered the same sense of freedom. Instead, they increasingly amplified my self-doubt and self-consciousness. I gradually and intentionally moved away from them rather than continuing to use them to escape my discomfort.
I sank into a depression, and many of the identities that had helped me navigate adolescence began to feel less convincing.
When I finished high school, most of my friends went away to college. Somehow, I knew that wasn't the path I wanted to take, though part of that decision was shaped by my awareness of my father's financial limitations and my own discomfort with asking for opportunities that felt beyond our means.
I also judged what I saw around me. Some of my peers seemed more interested in partying than studying, and I felt I had already done enough of that. I wanted something deeper than the conventional path I saw people following.
There was a mixture of genuine conviction, loneliness, and perhaps a sense of superiority in that judgment. Part of me felt I had outgrown my friends. Another part was a young man who didn't know where he belonged.
I worked and saved money, proving to myself that I could provide for myself. I still fantasized about being a rock star, but I also felt a growing restlessness with the life I was living.
Maybe the psychedelics had opened my awareness to possibilities beyond the reality I had previously known. Maybe it was my creative drive, or my frustration with a world that didn't seem to have room for everything I wanted to express and experience.
Whatever the combination of influences, one thing had become clear: I wasn't satisfied with the status quo.
Searching for a different way to live
At nineteen, I set out on a journey of self-discovery, moving from the East Coast to the West Coast and beginning to piece together a sense of what mattered most to me.
I immersed myself in the study of human potential. I practiced yoga, tried to meditate, cleaned up my diet, and explored acupuncture and bodywork. I dreamed of a life intimately connected to the natural world and imagined a more sustainable future for humanity as I studied ecological design principles.
I wanted to become the most optimized version of myself. Superhuman, in a way.
I believed that if I could find the right practices, knowledge, lifestyle, and way of understanding myself, I could overcome the parts of me I disliked. I could become someone who felt confident, whole, and free.
But the pursuit of a perfect life became its own kind of struggle. I spent years chasing an ideal, and relationships continued to open me up in painful ways. Eventually, I had to confront something more difficult than any external problem I was trying to solve.
I didn't like parts of who I was. I felt ashamed of them, and I wanted to change them.
Beneath my interest in self-improvement was a deeper question: What would it mean to accept myself without giving up on growth? How could I become more fully myself without treating my existing self as something that needed to be defeated?
And what did it mean to be a man?
Finding my way into men's work
In my search for answers, I came across the work of Francis Weller, who was preparing to guide a small group of men through a yearlong rite-of-passage process.
I was broke, but something about the timing and intention of the program felt so right that I managed to find a way to participate.
That process changed me.
For the first time, I experienced a deep sense of belonging in relationship with other men. I felt welcomed into a dimension of myself that I had longed to have accepted. Within that community, I began to reconnect with the emotions I had suppressed during adolescence in an effort to embody what I thought masculinity required.
I could be vulnerable without feeling that I had lost my dignity. I could acknowledge grief, uncertainty, and fear without those feelings defining my worth. I could be challenged by other men and begin to recognize the difference between being criticized and being met honestly.
Something shifted in my understanding of strength. I began to see that being able to feel deeply, take responsibility, and remain present through discomfort were capacities worth developing, rather than weaknesses to overcome.
The experience didn't resolve everything. It opened a path, one that would continue to challenge me and shape my understanding of myself, my relationships, and the kind of life I wanted to live.
Men's work became an integral part of my life from my early twenties onward, and it remains so today.
What I've learned through working with men
Much of what has shaped me has come through communities of men and the guidance of wise mentors. In these relationships, I've learned the practical dimensions of relating: how to communicate honestly, navigate conflict, take responsibility for my impact, and move away from anxiety-driven codependency.
I've developed a deeper understanding of the intelligence of my body, the influence of my presence and state of being, and the many dimensions of my emotional life. I've also cultivated a more spiritual and reverential relationship with my life and the world around me.
These lessons didn't come from theory alone. They emerged through the lived experience of being in relationship, encountering my own patterns, receiving feedback, making mistakes, and learning to respond differently.
I came to understand that many of the things I had tried to overcome through self-improvement needed something other than more effort. Some needed to be felt. Some needed to be understood in the context of the relationships in which they developed. Others required new ways of relating, practiced repeatedly until they became more available to me.
My life is no less challenging than it once was. I still encounter uncertainty, loss, frustration, and the familiar tendencies that can pull me away from myself. The difference is that I've learned more about how to meet those challenges without becoming entirely entangled in them.
I've developed a greater capacity to remain present, keep my heart open, and meet life with curiosity and awe. That changes how I experience my own life and how I show up for the people with whom I share it.
I would have it no other way.
Why this work continues to matter to me
I work with men because I know something about the cost of trying to find your place in the world while feeling that parts of you must remain hidden.
I know what it is to pursue freedom while being constrained by shame, to seek intimacy while protecting yourself from being seen, and to try to improve yourself while carrying the belief that who you are is somehow not enough.
I also know what can become possible when we find relationships in which we can examine those patterns honestly, develop new capacities, and begin to live with greater congruence.
My experience has taught me that growth doesn't happen in isolation. We need spaces where we can be challenged without being diminished, where honesty is valued over appearances, and where vulnerability and responsibility can exist alongside strength and action.
For me, men's work has been one of those spaces. It has helped me develop a relationship with masculinity that feels more integrated, grounded, and alive.
It is a path I continue to walk, and one I feel privileged to share with others.