I have a friend named Michael Namkung, and as children, neither he nor I was really taught how to understand or work with our emotions. So it goes for boys in our society. So it goes for a lot of people.
The conventional model of manhood doesn’t make space for living fully or connecting deeply, and Michael and I are both dedicated to changing that. As part of that work, we’ve been writing each other letters. Michael wrote to me first, then I wrote him back, and then he replied. What’s below is the fourth piece of correspondence in the exchange.
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May 18, 2023
Dear Michael,
Your last letter cuts deeply into the heart of things. To be a man who is carrying sorrow that he cannot even see, and to have such a predicament cloud out his access to/understanding of kindness… this is a path I have walked. Also, to have felt the transformation that grieving can bring, and to know it is at the root of the way forward… this has been my journey thus far, too.
I feel solidarity in your words.
Before I get into all that, you asked about the slant in my writing. I had a hunch you’d be curious about that given your reverence for writing as a physical act. Essentially, it’s this: I’m always looking for a new way to find spark, and taking a different angle on the paper can be an entry to flow. I don’t do that kind of thing all the time, but it can feel refreshing. Another thing I’ve been doing lately is switching up tense or perspective. There’s fertile ground in writing in the third person, for example.
Men, talking about pain
Anyway, back to these ideas about that inner world of pain that we can grow so blind to. It’s fitting that I wrote an entire paragraph as an aside before getting into it, I think. Because when we talk about hurt, we’re talking about one of the last places any of us wants to go. Even once the door to the conversation opens, the reflect can be to push it shut quickly.
Just a peak was enough. Can’t we leave it at that?
I won’t, though. I’m determined not to because I am so in love with what’s on the other side.
You mentioned despair, anger, depression. All very real afflictions, excruciating in their impact. What’s so compelling to me about you bringing these up next to the idea that you carried other feelings you were unwilling to see is that it played out this way for me, too.
We aren’t alone. It seems that across western culture, men are starting to wake up to the flaws in how we carry these emotions. I don’t view my writing as solely “men’s work,” but sorting out conventional masculinity is certainly a big theme, and I know there’s a lot out there about how men are really struggling right now.
What stories do our photo albums tell?
A few years ago, I came to see myself more clearly. I had been through some serious bouts of depression too, and if for no other reason than simply being another a resident of planet Earth with some sense of the suffering happening in lives and ecosystems everywhere, I had also held despair.
But it was my anger in particular that demanded my attention.
There was a burning rage inside of me, rarely visible to the outside world, and it pushed me to ask, in a new way: what is going on here?
Eventually, I found an answer.
On a shelf in my office, there is a plastic container, about the size of a shoe box, full of old pictures. Some are from before I was born– my mom painting a room in the still-empty nest; both of my parents on their wedding day; a car in a driveway. But many include me, first as a baby and then as a toddler. My siblings join in some pictures too, and I think the newest one in the box is from when I was in high school. They paint a portrait of people and times and places, a march from infancy to young adulthood. But they also show something else.
If you look closely, you will see that in the pictures when I am very young, my smile is bright—the unadulterated joy of being alive. The same shine is there in the one where I’m heading off to kindergarten, as well as in those taken in New Hampshire, where we went for a week-long family vacation the following summer.
Soon after, though, my eyes start to lose their spark. My smile isn’t so uninhibited. Some part of me is gazing beyond the moment at hand. I look confused, like I’ve just been wounded and I’m not even sure what hit me.
It’s in enough shots to call it consistent. You can see it in school photos, in candids snapped before church on Easter, in my U-9 soccer card. You can see it with my brother, too—just in stages of life four years behind mine. If you weren’t me, or us, or someone who knows our family well, you might not see anything. Hell, I’m on the inside and I missed it for a very long time. I can’t not see it anymore, though.
What is my face telling me?
I was in the second grade when my parents split. That’s what the changes on my face are about. As a child, I had something that, even before I had thoughts, I thought I could count on. Home was a safe place, a place of peace, a haven… and then it was not. My parents stopped being together and my dad moved across town and the entire reality that I had trusted in every day shattered.
You quoted Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem kindness:
“Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things.”
This is what I lost. This is the well that, when I am quiet and still and open, my grief draws from: a child, still crying out for the togetherness that had made him feel so whole.
Sharing what I know to be a deep and underlying source of my pain strikes me as the most honest way to reply to your letter. I’m curious: does your grief have an origin story?
On the nature of compassion
About that other part: kindness, and how loss is tied up into its very existence. I have an old friend who, decades ago, lost her sister to suicide. She told me once that at the bottom of her grief, when she had cried her deepest tears, she had found compassion. The way she phrased it, though, was that she had found the choice of compassion: that she had seen and felt all these emotions inside of her, and they had led her to the opportunity to decide to extend compassion.
For a long time, I had wanted to find compassion as objective reality (and I’ll also note: I’m using “compassion” and “kindness” interchangeably. I may be off with that, but let’s let that be another discussion). Dig up enough of what hurts, tell the honest truth about it, really feel it without holding back, and there it’ll be: compassion, sitting and waiting for us, like a clearing in the woods.
I think my friend has it right, though: compassion is something we have the chance to extend, both to ourselves and others. I often think of it in terms of an invitation: when a situation is difficult but I invite compassion to sit down next to it, there’s a lot that changes.
Maybe it’s just that grieving loss makes us meek enough to let down the same guard that blocks us from extending kindness. Drop the defense mechanisms, and perhaps compassion is simply the obvious next step.
One other thing I’m finding lately is that compassion lives in the here and now. It is concerned with this moment rather than what was or what could have been/could be. It’s just that relative to the past, there can still be plenty of emotion that I’m carrying today that needs caring for.
I’m grateful for you sharing on this subject, particularly as it has related to marriage and relationship for you. That’s a very alive topic for me. Also, this whole thing—us talking about loss and kindness and their impact in our lives—feels more like open inquiry than finished conclusion. That’s a very good thing.
Is it accurate to say we’re writing “about” our fathers?
Changing subjects before I sign off, what you said regarding how writing “about” your father isn’t quite the right way to put it… I get what you mean. While I do sometimes feel like a sketch artist just trying to show readers how life with my dad looked, the core of the work is an act of relationship. To ask questions, to unpack memories and reassemble them, to go down new roads… it’s all very alive. A wonderful grief counselor once said to me: “death ends a life, but not a relationship.”
Also, your line about “bringing shadows home” is pure poetry.
Finally, cool fact about the etymology of “text.” Here’s to seeing the whole cloth.
Much love, brother,
Jonathan
I wanted to share a couple more notes about Michael and his work. Like me, he is both a writer and a writing teacher, and he has classes starting in mid-July. I highly recommend joining; some of what I’ve shared here, I wrote in his class.
Michael is also an ultimate player who won a bunch of championships and was inducted into the Hall of Fame last year.