un-forsaking boyhood

an essay about my special bookshelf, the recurring need for boyhood stories, and helping the ManChild

If I were the type to share pictures of my work area, my office, my desk, etc. such that you all could ogle it and judge/envy accordingly and feed your desire for mimetic content, on one wall you’d see a bookshelf that looks like it was plucked from the room of a fifth grader c. 2002, or at the very least locked in time, like the dust-covered belongings of a college-goer in their childhood bedroom within a house of empty nesters.

What’s on it:

A stuffed animal (puppy), my high school diploma, a baseball signed by Joba Chamberlain, a trophy I won in a youth writing competition.

Every Harry Potter, Pendragon, Artemis Fowl book, the whole Bartimaeus trilogy, and many of the Redwall books.

A complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes comics.

Michael Chabon

’s Summerland.

A soapbox derby car, an Ident-A-Kid card with my youthful face on it, a photo of me in my soccer uniform and captain’s armband from senior year, a photo of me on a camping trip, of me and my marching bandmates.

This bookshelf would doubtless cause some viewers to question its appropriateness in the context of my age. In fact, it causes me to do so. I mean, a stuffed animal? Really? I am an adult man who will soon have a child of their own. It’s incongruous with the masculine image I have of myself, that most men have of themselves. By and large, we believe ourselves to enjoy hardier bookshelf contents, things like barometers, books featuring 19th century ships, anything made of mahogany, perhaps even weapons of some kind.

Others, of course, would be more forgiving. Certainly, some other grown men have a similar situation of boyhood object retention on display somewhere. Legos, Funko Pops, trading cards. In fact, things like these have, in some ways, also become associated with manhood. We like breakfast cereals, cars, and comic books¹.

The problem is that 17 year old boys also like these things, as well as 17 year old girls². These things—despite being totems of boyhood in the form of interests and hobbies, and not, perhaps, indicative of regression—may imply a certain level of emotional immaturity, especially as regarded by the opposite sex, the relational context with women being the bar by which manhood is sometimes judged.

Women, by contrast, embrace, crave, and return to girlhood often. For many women, youth—both literally and figuratively—is—rightly or wrongly—the ultimate glory of life. My mother-in-law still unironically considers it rude when I say her true age aloud, as though her age were an affront to her intrinsic value. The ‘girlhood’ essays that are overdone on Substack have become so for a reason; for women, it’s very apparent how it’s worth exploring the loss of their innocence in the face of a society that demands it, that craves the youthful spirit of women.

A man young in spirit is not vivacious, nor their innocence lauded. These qualities may be attractive to some women, but to other men and to ourselves, they are to be squeezed out and remediated with time, and pain if necessary. Boyhood, for modern men of my age, is not often a time to be harkened to. It was a time of weak handshakes, when you were naïve and stupid, even if you simultaneously now still enjoy its material trappings.

The older a man is, the more ‘successful’ he’s likely to be, simply by virtue of time and experience. There’s evidence that male-pattern balding is a selectively bred trait—it signals a man as a silverback. I don’t need to cite statistics to tell you that women, by and large, prefer older men in relationships. Nearly every traditionally gendered relationship I know of in my life, young and old, features a man who is older than the woman.

For these reasons, I believe the exploration of boyhood has become somewhat gauche in the culture, whatever plumbed from its depths reductive when applying toward the needs of modern manhood. There are recent examples of successful attempts³ and, of course, pandering to the second largest demographic in the world will never die, along with the many annals of boyhood stories from the past. But the story of boyhood progresses as we further enter modernity; there are truths to growing up in the seventies that don’t apply to the early aughts. In my cultural viewing, we don’t address these enough.

I maintain that we should un-forsake boyhood, as I have both on my bookshelf and in my fiction work.

There was a time, in my early to mid twenties—not coincidentally, the time when a human brain is only just fully forming and we are categorically transitioning from boys to actual men—when I grappled constantly with my boyish past as it retreated into the near distance.

I had, in this time, so many mental health issues and along with them a therapist who informed me: depression is not necessarily sadness; it’s self-hatred. Most of the self-hatred I felt was borne from shame for my recent past within the boyhood that was rapidly receding, the most common symptom being the mental tics of remembrance at times of disquiet:

How could I have been so disrespectful to women? Why was I such a bully? Why did I deal with losing so poorly? What if I wasn’t such a jerk/baby/weakling?

In response I fell into a number of addictions within the wider casting of the term, which were destructive and hard to escape in their own right: video games, sex/pornography, marijuana, etc.

At the time I was at risk of becoming what we in the cultural parlance now call a “ManChild.”⁴

Like many males, I turned to self-help and psychology (non fiction books!) to try and work my way out of the situation as therapy, apparently, was not enough.⁵

I found the concept of ‘the Shadow’ by way of Phil Stutz (pre-Jonah-Hill-Netflix), by way of Jung, and while I didn’t directly assess it in the ways they presented, I realized this was what I was dealing with: my boyhood as the shadow. I was quelling the disquiet of my boyhood by further falling into the trappings of boyhood. I was subconsciously placating the boy within me.

The stereotypical ManChild is not a man/child because he is both man and child. We are all simultaneously man and child in that we cannot escape our past (the child) and what makes us the men we are. They are a man trapped in child form, because they do not allow the boy they used to be—the boy they don’t know—to occupy the childish state of their manhood.

You can’t get rid of the boy you carry with you. All you can do is acknowledge him. For me, this was the way out. You cannot change the boy you were, but you can forgive him, and once you can forgive him, you can celebrate him, and no longer do you have to placate his tendencies.

I do this by writing.

I’m known to write stories about masculine youth, perhaps one too many, perhaps giving the illusion I’m stuck in discovering and re-discovering the simple and obvious, the universalities we all learn and take for granted. A large part of my bildungsroman novel, the big T, is firmly anchored in boyhood.

But I’m re-learning what we’ve collectively learned, re-applied for the modern man. There’s no truth too simple to not be learned again, something to the retention of ‘childhood wonder’. We must re-approach boyhood with a certain level of ignorance of the sort traditional manhood is likely to eschew⁶ if we are to make sense of what made us how we are and how to deal with it.

Maybe that’s where reading comes in, where fiction comes in. Not just of my work, but in the tales that speak to our boyhood, interpreted instead by our older selves. I’m writing what I wish—in that troubled time of my life—I had to read.

It is my belief the individual, as well as the culture, should make way again to embrace the inner boyhood and hold up a mirror to it such that our ManChildren can see: you are reacting to the world with behaviors you had when you were a boy because you have not let go of the same problems.

That’s why I have the bookshelf.

It’s also why you’ll never see it.

1. For example, Jerry Seinfeld famously likes all these things.

2. Unfortunately, Jerry Seinfeld also likes 17 year old girls.

3. There’s literally a movie from 2014 by one of my favorite directors, Richard Linklater, called Boyhood, that was well received.

4. In fact this is so in the mainstream discourse that Sabrina Carpenter recently-ish released a song called “Manchild”, although I’m sure you already know this.

5. At least I didn’t get into something more harmful, as is often the case for the more impressionable.

6. Have you ever been on Reddit? No one is allowed to not know anything.