Photo by whoislimos on Unsplash — Photo by whoislimos on Unsplash

Don’t fight me, just hear me out, no other sequence of just three letters is equally powerful. Add the suffix “ly” and you’ve just created a storm that either becomes the wind beneath a young man’s wings or a torrent that suffocates him. Add the prefix “wo” and we could be entering dangerous territory depending on the tone, usage, and subject. But let’s forget all that and focus on the root word for a bit because there’s a lot hidden beneath it that most people don’t know about. Let’s see what “M. A. N” is truly capable of.

Here’s something we all know; words define us. Here’s something we all don’t; words determine everything we experience.

Imagine that the course of your entire life, whether you failed or succeeded, is determined by these same words. What you're called. What you're labeled as. What definitions you need to align yourself to. What descriptions people expect from you.

These words, even though you’re often not the one choosing them, end up defining you and your life. This is how “M. A. N” comes into play.

We’re either very lucky or very unlucky to be alive during a period where everything conservative and traditional is being upended, slowly but surely. Concepts such as masculinity and gender roles have always been solidified. Determined. Stubborn. Now, liberal movements are redefining them. Reshaping them. Reshaping the world we live in.

We hope everyone will catch up, but we might never live to see it.

And that’s okay. Because as a man growing up in Jamaica, living day-to-day by the rigorous definitions of what a man is, your life can quickly become the hell you pray to escape.

A man is meant to provide, so you go out and find work that might not suit you, but suits the food that keeps your family alive. But getting an honest bread is hard. Negative peer pressure is as guaranteed as police corruption and those same uniforms who’re meant to help, end up doing harm. So where do you go when you’re unqualified for scrappy job openings? You turn to the streets.

Either homeless, dead, or weaponized.

If you don’t end up suffering, you end up dead. And if you’re not dead, you’re something far worse. Trapped in a life of crime. The perfect target for the system that put you there. In and out as they designed it.

And then they say “Why didn’t you seek help?”, “Why didn’t you talk about your problems?”

The answer to that is clear and simple. As a man living in Jamaica, you’re taught not to talk about your problems. You should just bear the burden on your own and figure it out. You’re not taught to talk about how you’re feeling. You should either exist in a state of stoic expression or fits of rage. In Jamaica, rejecting bad influence is the fastest way to be considered a nerd, a queer, or simply not a man.

The word man only has three letters but contains a world of expectations, pains, and problems. We often don’t get to be who we truly want to be. We often don’t get judged based on who we truly are. We just get segmented into caricatures and warped concepts. Letter by letter. First “M” then “A”, then “N”.