Does Nobody Ask Why Anymore?

Going to be honest: lately, I feel about as valued as a man as genital warts. That is an ugly sentence. It is also the closest I can get to how it feels sometimes, both at home and scrolling through social media. Like my presence is something to tolerate, my masculinity something to suspect, and my worth something I have to earn by being useful. I already spend enough time being the villain in my own story. Finding versions of that verdict everywhere else gets exhausting. And I keep coming back to the same question: Does nobody ask why anymore? I have complex PTSD. I have also been a horrible man and husband at times. Both can be true. I can carry wounds I did not choose and still be responsible for wounds I have caused. I can have been overwhelmed, frightened, defensive, or emotionally unavailable and still have hurt someone who needed something different from me. Knowing what happened inside me does not undo what someone else experienced beside me. I have things to own. Reactions I wish I could take back. Times when being consumed by my own pain left too little room for anyone else’s. There are consequences to that, and being honest about my history means being honest about those consequences, too. But sometimes it feels as though I am the only person expected to hold both truths. I am supposed to understand how my pain affected my behavior while taking responsibility for that behavior. Yet when I try to explain the pain, it can feel as though the explanation itself becomes another offense. An excuse. Self-pity. Making it about me again. How do we understand what needs to change if we cannot talk about what keeps happening underneath it? “Why?” is a question I need to answer honestly. I also need to be able to hear it asked with some willingness to understand the answer. There is a difference between someone asking why because they want to know me and someone asking, “Why are you like this?” because they have already decided. I can feel that difference. And lately, I feel like a tool. Take me out when something needs fixing. When a decision needs making. When someone needs a provider, a leader, a solution, or a person who can carry the weight. Then, when the work is finished, back into the drawer. The drawer is lonely. Especially when I have helped build it. I have spent years making myself useful. Being capable. Showing up. Solving problems. Sometimes giving more than I had, then quietly resenting that nobody noticed what it cost. I have said I was fine when I wasn’t. Made my needs difficult to see, then felt hurt that they went unseen. I have wanted to be understood while struggling to let someone close enough to understand me. That belongs in this story, too. Still, I want to believe there is room for a man to need care before he becomes a crisis. Room for someone to notice that the person carrying everything might also want to be held. And then there is the criticism. The constant correction. The feeling that whatever I did manage to do gets lost beneath what I did wrong. How does tearing someone down help them become better? Ask a coach. A coach has to address mistakes. Sometimes directly. Sometimes firmly. But picture a player who expects to be humiliated every time he gets something wrong. Watch him start hesitating. Second-guessing. Looking toward the sideline instead of trusting what he knows. I recognize that feeling. What happens when that sideline is in your own home? When you start bracing for the review before you have even finished trying? I need honest feedback. I need to hear when I have hurt someone, missed something, or failed to follow through. But there has to be room to get it right, too. To have effort recognized. To make progress without every mistake bringing the entire history of my failures back onto the field. Trust takes time to rebuild. My effort today does not require someone else to feel safe tomorrow. But I need us to be able to talk about what rebuilding would actually look like—what needs to change, how we will recognize it, and how we will treat each other while that work is happening. And I have to ask myself the same question: have I made someone I love feel that way? Have my reactions taught them to hesitate, stay quiet, or expect criticism from me? I cannot ask for a gentler place to grow without helping create one. But tearing each other down and then demanding that we do better—how is that supposed to work? At some point, we have to care about what our words are doing to the person we keep saying we want to reach. Social media makes that harder sometimes. I open my phone and find another argument about what men are, what men want, what men ruin. I know women encounter their own versions of that contempt. We seem increasingly willing to explain whole groups of people through the worst things some of them have done. Then we bring those verdicts home. We stop meeting the person in front of us with curiosity. We collect evidence. We hear a familiar phrase and prepare our defense before the other person finishes speaking. Since when does hate help us do this better? I know what shame does inside me. I know how quickly it can turn into hiding, defensiveness, or another reason to believe I am beyond loving. I am working on what I do with those feelings. I also wish we would ask what we are trying to accomplish when contempt becomes the way we speak to each other. Accountability asks something of me. It gives me work to do. Being treated as worthless leaves me wondering whether any amount of work will ever matter. Nobody owes me forgiveness, closeness, or another chance. Someone I have hurt gets to decide what they need, including distance. I can respect that and still hope we leave room to recognize each other’s humanity. I want to become a man who can hear someone’s pain without immediately defending himself. Who can ask why without using the answer to escape responsibility. Who can say what he needs before resentment starts speaking for him. I am asking for that same curiosity in return. Ask what I did. Ask what it cost you. Ask what I am doing to change it. But somewhere in that conversation, please leave room to ask what happened to me. What I am still struggling to say. Whether I need help, affection, or a little reassurance that I matter when there is nothing left for me to fix. I want to be accountable for the man I have been and supported in becoming the man I am trying to be. And sometimes, I just want someone to open the drawer because they missed me.