Part One: The Origins of the Perfect Man
Our hero's journey begins with a devastating loss and a world class coverup.
[Part One of a Twelve-Part Series: A Roadmap to Freedom]
At the core of every Gatsby man is loss. Early on in life, we lose something: It might be losing our family unit to divorce, or losing our friends in a move. It might be losing the sense of safety in our home due to inconsistency, neglect, or abuse. Or maybe we simply lose the innocence of believing that the people around us will be able to be there for us in the way we had hoped they might.
This original loss triggers a sense of abandonment too overwhelming for a boy to feel. Instead, we create a fantasy scenario in our little psyches: We can get the love we lost back… IF.
For Gatsbys, our IF is always the same: If I’m perfect, I won’t ever be abandoned again. It’s a setup. But we have to believe it. To know it as false would mean to feel the full extent of the original loss we endured.
I was four or five when my parents divorced, and my father moved out of the house. I can recall that day vividly, because it was the most devastating day of my childhood. I remember sitting with my mother on the porch watching my dad drive away in his pickup truck. I was sure I’d never see him again.
Because I couldn’t handle the overwhelming loss of the most important man in my life, I unconsciously created my IF that day:
If I’m perfect, my dad will come back.
Every Gatsby’s version of perfect will look slightly different, because every family is slightly different. In some homes, perfection might be intelligence—an Ivy League education, perhaps — or worldly success: becoming a doctor, lawyer, politician, marketing exec, or Wall Street rainmaker. In other homes, perfect might look like being adventurous, artistic, tough, or handy around the house. Maybe a boy feels the most lovable when he’s winning every game, or when he brings home a really impressive potential romantic partner.
A good way to understand the makeup of your Gatsby shell is to ask yourself a few questions:
What was important to my parents?
What did they value?
What were their priorities?
What got me love from my mother?
What got me love from my father?
Being liked was my father’s highest ideal. He used to boast: “I’m the nicest guy I know.” So my Gatsby shell included always trying to be likable—a task it took me 38 years to understand was impossible. No one is always likable. And to try to pull it off meant to deny my own truth again and again until I was an angry, bitter puddle of poison. Not something I’d recommend.
Our perfect, outer shells are shaped a lot by our society’s collective values, too. As men, we’re taught early on in life that success means buying power. Most of our cultural heroes - celebrities, rockstars, athletes, tech billionaires, are world class consumers, too. I was a rabid hip-hop and rap fan in my youth, and surely my daily diet of lyrics that included call-outs to brands like Rolex, Gucci, and Mercedes-Benz had a significant effect on why I became a fashion and lifestyle journalist hawking the same brands some two decades later.
It all adds up. And the majority of us go a lifetime without asking Why? We don’t question our urge towards perfection, whatever perfection looks like to us. We’re on autopilot, and our Gatsby shell is usually pretty thick.
But there are certain events in a man’s life that shake those carefully built fortifications. Maybe he spirals into depression after losing the job, or career that defined him, or the death of a loved one taps into some ancient sadness that he can’t seem to shake. Maybe he wakes up one day and his life feels totally meaningless.
For many Gatsby men, the most profound cracks in our outer shells appear when we’re facing turmoil in our romantic relationships, specifically surrounding a breakup, when the loss - or potential loss - of the person we love triggers our original childhood losses.
That’s what happened to me in early 2015, when the loss of my ex, Amy, triggered some of my oldest losses. Suddenly, my life felt both fragile and empty. Without the woman who had been such a critical component to my perfect shell, I began questioning everything. That breakup prompted the most intentional excavation I’d ever launched into the depths of myself, where I unearthed decades of painful memories of loss, leading all the way back to my dad. Suddenly, I couldn’t hide anymore, and I had to face what was really there.
We can’t predict when our shells might falter, but the important thing we must remember as men is that we aren’t losing it, going crazy, or having a mental breakdown when our carefully constructed veneers begin to crack. In fact, we’re being given a gift.
Because while our pasts and our original childhood losses go unresolved, we remain stuck in perpetual adolescence, afraid of the monsters in our closets we don’t want to face, adding more and more reinforcement to our Gatsby shells in an attempt to avoid feeling the inevitable loss that waits patiently for each of us.
But if we’re willing to look that loss in the eyes, unpack it, romance it a little, that thing we were sure was a monster is actually an invitation to freedom, sovereignty, and ultimately, true manhood.
So queue up the Leonard Cohen (There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in”) and prepare for a wild ride. A ride that more men seem to be going on these days than ever. And I believe that trend will continue. Factors on this planet like the rising cost of living and resulting burnout rate, the inevitable political, economic and environmental shifts, and the social stresses and pressures applied by an ever-shifting world all ramp up the pressure that make the inevitable cracks of our perfect shells harder to avoid.
So let’s dive in. We know collectively, on some level, that the time is coming to face ourselves anyway. And when we do, we’ll need to understand the landscape of what we’re dealing with. We’ll need a roadmap for what to do when the shell we’ve spent a lifetime constructing begins to fall away.
This is that roadmap.
(Part Two will be published on July 25th.)
sheeesh. felt every word of that.....And let's be honest I would rather be the man that could be vulnerable and confident in the things he says and does. Thats a real Gatsby man. Beautifully written Sean, looking forward to part 2
Looking forward to more.
I imagine I'm not the only one who can relate to quite a bit of this from my past.