17 Apr 2017

The first time I realised that gender was a thing was when I was 5-years-old, riding around on my very first bicycle. We were at Centennial Park and my bowl cut was blowing in the wind. The bike had these sweet little tassels and training wheels and I remember these 10-year-old boys saying- ‘Hey buddy, that’s a girl’s bike’.

I asked why and they said, ‘well it’s a pink Power Rangers bike’. I remember looking down and thinking, they’re right, it totally is. That’s when I made the connection that the colour pink wasn’t meant to be associated with my male identity. I rode the bike over to mum, dumped it on the ground and told her I was never going to ride it again.

I went to Knox Grammar School in Sydney, which was a pretty masculine school. Knox’s motto translates to Do The Manly Thing–which I think is pretty cringeworthy. But at the time, I totally drank the kool-aid. I moulded my identity and my masculinity on how good I was at sport, how attractive I thought I was to girls and how much money I thought I was going to make. If I could show as little emotion as possible while doing those 3 things, then I thought I was a pretty good Aussie bloke.

Then the best thing of my life happened to me. I’d always wanted to play professional rugby, it was a big goal of mine but when the biggest game of the year finally rolled around I broke my leg in the first 10 seconds. It ended up being not just a broken leg but a near death experience- I was only half an hour away from dying. I had 6 operations, a metal rod, 4 screws, 2 skin grafts, 2 blood transfusions and was faced with the reality that I wouldn’t be able to run again. I was in hospital for 2 weeks and spent the next 6 months on the couch. For the first time in my life I felt truly vulnerable- something that I had always thought was a sign of weakness.

It was an incredibly lonely and isolating experience. I was 16, with no real connection to my mates or the person I thought I wanted to be.

My grandpa told me, ‘If you were that good at sport, then imagine if you could put that energy into something a little bit more meaningful.’ And eventually, I realised the injury was giving me the chance to be myself. I could stop trying so hard to be a part of the cool crowd; the injury was my get out of jail free card.

Now I run an initiative called Man Cave with my business partner Jamin Heppell. It’s a preventative mental health and emotional intelligence program for boys and young men. We’re in the midst of a crisis–more boys drop out of school than ever before, suicide is the leading cause of death among boys and young men and one in three women are affected by violence from an intimate partner.

Where are we failing these boys?

Since they’re kids boys are told, don’t cry, man up and don’t be a pussy. We’re taught don’t be gay and don’t be like a girl- as if those are negative things. When our minds are most malleable, we are policed and validated by rules that eventually, we internalise, and enforce on other people, even when we experience the damaging effects ourselves.

As boys and young men, we need to keep better track of our emotional health. When we run down the road and trip over and scrape a knee, we go home and grab an icepack or go to the medicine cabinet and slap on a band-aid. But where do we go to deal with everyday emotional cuts and scrapes? Rejection, loneliness, loss, guilt and trauma are factors that we seldom talk about or treat. People have a long way to go in relating to their emotional health.

A lot of the conversation around depression and suicide is focused on sharing our emotions and starting conversations- and that’s incredibly important. But there’s another part of the picture: encouraging safe, non-judgemental spaces where we can really practice generous listening. We need to provide a space to allow people to speak their truth and let them know that they’re being seen, heard, valued and loved.

by Hunter Johnson, the founder of Man Cave