For the longest time, I’ve loved musicals. And I never really understood why until about a few weeks ago. They are loud, and cheesy, and of varying quality and timeliness. They can feel dated, and over produced and drama. But here’s the thing musicals do for me. When a character belts their precise feelings; and everyone listening feels the way they feel - that practice opened me up. Life is better when you like musicals because the earnestness of song penetrates the trauma of shame.

Men are socialized to be a number of different things. What we are not socialized to be is emotionally fluent nor emotionally expressive. And this kills us! Literally and figuratively, acutely and chronically - emotional repression causes the stress and constrains the options that produce deadly results for men and by extension, their partners and children.

But do this for me: put on Dear Evan Hansen’s You will be found right now, and sing along. Really, sing! It’s just talking to meter, so start there. You can whisper it, and it’s still going to work. You can’t do it and not feel moved. I get choked up pretty much instantly at this point with that song and many others.

Having a toddler, you end up singing a lot of songs, and what that does, aside from making you a marginally better vocalist is retrain your body and brain to experience all the feelings, if you’re open to it.

I can’t fully articulate how full an interior life I had growing up that I was utterly petrified to share with anyone. And how the things that celebrated that interior life were derided and ignored by people who I cared what they thought. Now, as an adult, I really don’t care what they think, and I’m starting to see the value in knowing that interior life and sharing it with the people I do care about.

For so long, my response to life was to look at everything I did and everything I felt with shame. And that is so awful.

I don’t that as much as anymore. I’m learning to name, consider, even cherish every feeling as the source of something worthy. My favorite movie last year (er, at least not titled Black Panther ) was the indie film Hearts Beat Loud, starring Kiersey Clemons and Nick Offerman. In one scene, Nick Offerman, playing Kiersey Clemons’ father, tells her:

When life gives you lemons, you make music.

And this simple advice is probably more useful than just about anything else I’ve heard. Because the opposite of music or art is not something practical or profane, it is shame and anhedonia (the lack of pleasure at once pleasureable things). From an advice column:

[Art is] It’s a way of seeing your life through a lens that makes everything — good and bad, confusing and clarifying, uplifting and depressing — valuable. Shame is the opposite of art. When you live inside of your shame, everything you see is inadequate and embarrassing. 

Yes, exactly. I get to choose what to do with things that happen to me. I can choose to see everything as having value or choose to see things as worthless. Guess which one I was socialized to see?

But musicals offered a relief from that, and that’s ultimately why I loved them then and now. Because every character, every ensemble member, would get up on to a stage in a dark room of strangers, and make them feel the same thing for a number. Everything and everyone in a musical production has worth, and that message rang true to the deepest part of me. If only I’d been strong enough to follow that. Instead, I was trained to take my aggression - the only acceptable male emotion - and channel it into something “useful”. Sometimes that was literally violent things, like sports, but more often it was into things that were on their face not violent, like work and romantic pursuits. The desire to fix everything stems from a desire to have nothing to be ashamed for.

What you find is that the more you fix, the more is to be ashamed for. The real solution is to see that fixing the soul is not something you can do by yourself. It is something that happens, painfully slowly, in loving community.

Whatever you’re feeling right now; you’re not alone. You’re not some damaged and unlovable skrell, you’re not without basic human dignity. More importantly, if you choose to see things this way, and talk about it honestly, you not only can have a life that’s enjoyable to live but actually make art:

And this next part, sounds like nonsense
But I swear to God, Tina Fey gave me confidence
Taught me everything that is good comes from honesty
Everybody’s got a voice, you just gotta follow it
She on her role model shit