Strong Enough To Shatter

Some nights I drink to forget.

Other nights, I drink to remember that I once felt something real.

The truth is, I’m a 29-year-old man with three kids, a long-time girlfriend, and a heart that sometimes feels like a locked room I’ve lost the key to. On paper, I have what some might call a life. In reality, I’ve mastered the art of smiling while drowning.

Alcohol doesn’t taste good anymore. It just tastes like silence.

It doesn’t make me brave. It just turns the volume down on the parts of me screaming for something I can’t name.

The Quiet Struggle of the “Strong” Man

No one tells boys that one day, being a man will mean pretending you’re okay so well that even you start to believe it…until you’re alone.

I’m not the kind of man who writes everyday in my journal, it makes it hard to awaken what I’ve been trying to keep asleep sometimes.

But here I am, writing this like it’s a confession scratched onto a bathroom mirror.

I carry depression like stain on a T-shirt, but I wear a hoodie so no one sees.

Instead, they see me laugh. They see me provide. They see me stay.

But they don’t see that some nights I stare at the ceiling, wondering how someone can be surrounded by family, and still feel like a ghost in his own home.

Love with Conditions

My girlfriend and I, we’ve been together more than a decade. That’s a sentence that sounds like a love story. But it’s more like a quiet treaty we’ve both stopped negotiating.

I love her. I really do. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt unconditional love. Not from her. Maybe not from anyone.

There’s always some invisible contract:

Be strong. Don’t be too weak.

Be useful. Don’t need too much.

Be a man, but the kind that never needs help.

I’ve communicated these things to her before, she claims she doesn’t care about that stuff. “I love you for who you are” she confirms.

I believe her until the little things pass my way.

“Hey, I saw this job and they pay more. Maybe you should apply.”

“We really need to crack down on our spending.”

“You can find a trade job that actually trains you while you work, my brother did.”

Most people probably hear that she is just trying to help. But all I hear is “You’re not good enough.”

Some nights, I wonder: if I fell apart completely, would anyone stay to help me rebuild? Or do they only love the version of me that keeps it together? Do my friends and family only invite me because I bring laughter into the room?

And here’s a question that keeps me up sometimes:

Is it still love if it only survives because I refuse to show my sadness?

The Philosophical Weight of Feeling

Here’s a philosophical question no one asks out loud:

What if the thing you need most, softness, safety, surrender, is the one thing you’re not allowed to ask for as a man?

We don’t teach boys how to be soft. We teach them how to take hits.

But nobody ever taught me how to receive love. Only that it is earned, but not how.

Through labor. Through loyalty. Through silence.

But what if love that needs to be earned was never love in the first place?

And what if, bear with me here,

what if alcohol isn’t just a vice, but an unconscious ritual of grief?

What if every glass I raise is a tiny funeral for the parts of me I’ve never let live?

A Final Thought

I’m not writing this for pity.

I’m writing it for anyone, man, woman, parent, partner, who has ever sat quietly in a room full of people they love and wondered:

“Why do I still feel alone?”

Maybe this is our generation’s burden, to look like we have it all together while secretly unraveling in slow motion.

But maybe, just maybe, writing it down is a way of holding the thread instead of losing it.

If you see yourself in this, you’re not broken.

You’re just tired of pretending.

And maybe that’s where healing begins, not with a solution, but with finally telling the truth.

After writing all this… I still feel like I will never tell my family the truth. I don’t want things to be worse.