Welcome to All My Regret!

I want this to be a public place to grapple with and discuss masculinity and vulnerability. I created this space to learn from my many, and likely many more, missteps as a hetero cis brown man living in the United States, in those interactions with my partner, my children, my family, my colleagues, my friends, that have held one, or multitudes, of regret. My main question is: what happens after regret? That’s the engagement I hope to have in this space. Its taken me a lot of courage, and a lot of time, to open up this space.

But I’m here now, and hopefully you’ll join me.

What do you get?

You get short essays about issues I'm thinking about, times and places of regret, and anything related. You'll sometimes get it raw and unfiltered or highly edited and curated. You'll get stories that you may find yourself in, albeit in different ways, with different people. Maybe you'll get a mirror, or maybe you’ll get a spotlight.

Why?

I believe there are so few spaces to talk masculinity, without holding it up in itself as an answer to fragility, or an answer at all. I recognize that masculinity and masc is very context specific, but I'm hoping to open some dialogue about what it means to be considered masc in this fraught world where masculinity is increasingly used as a cudgel to drown out dialogue, to shut out gender non-conforming, trans, queer, bipoc, disabled, and other voices. To pit nations against each other, and as a tool within religious zealotry to silence opposition.

To generously paraphrase Alok Menon, when people act out against queer and trans and gender non-conforming individuals, it is often because they are afraid of how they themselves grapple with being vulnerable. I have feared non-conforming bodies before, and I have feared my own body. This is my space to think through that, and other sites. And it might be for you too.

Subscribe and you'll get a piece at least once per month. I look forward to the dialogue and see you soon!