If Men Were 100% Honest

One night when I was at the house of one of the church members, I was sexually abused and I went, I told my mother, I will never forget what she told me, she's like you can never tell anyone that this happened, This didn't happen, don't talk about this, what's really interesting about secrets and the reason I was willing to talk about this today is because that secret ate me alive, so every time I talk about this it's me recovering. my power a little more. In partnership with unlikely collaborators, we have designed a framework of insight questions for communities with common experiences aimed at broadening self-acceptance and deepening self-understanding.

This group of men were asked: Have you ever felt like you needed to apologize for aspects of your life and If so, why are these your responses? Sometimes I feel like I can't be a man comfortably in public now. If this is your secret and you would like to step forward, claim it and share your story, you can do it in three one. two 3 I came out as transgender when I was 14, right after my father passed away, my father was very abusive and very homophobic so I never came out simply because I was afraid of what my life would be like so as soon as I He passed away, I confessed to my mom, who was always on my side, she was one of my biggest fans, and while I was in high school, I had a feeling of being on top of the world.

I loved what it felt like to be myself. It was the best thing I've experienced as a junior towards the end of the year. I was going into the bathroom and someone followed me and grabbed me by the neck and threw me against the wall and strangled me and hugged me. there until I was basically begging for mercy and went to my school about it and they didn't do anything, they told me that because it happened in the bathroom it wasn't something they could prove actually happened so I didn't do it. Tell anyone for months that I just let it eat me up.

I just went to school every day terrified of my life between that and how much I drank, that's what finalized my decision to drop out of school, but it's also what that taught me. I can't live in this little hole I was living in. I decided that the only way I should live my life was fully as myself so I went ahead and finished high school early and was able to enjoy my first real year of being me and it was the best decision I've ever made but I still feel that when I go out in public I can't really be who I am.

I feel like everyone is looking at me all the time. I feel like everyone's opinions are being Can I ask you why you wanted to share that secret today? My community really needs it right now. It's very sad to be online every day and see my trans brothers and sisters being murdered so it's very important for me to stand up now because my generation really needs it so if anyone can relate to Jaden C's secret , you can step forward in three 1 2 3. Hi, I grew up in a very religious and almost traditional home. I am openly queer.

And I feel like a lot of times, especially the way I dress, I'm more flamboyant and more feminine looking, so I feel like a lot of my family members see that as in my past situations, like me. I have turned completely pink from head to toe and everywhere and I have had other men take photos of me and laugh at me and make fun of me. I even had others like male figures and even children like making fun of me saying: Oh yeah, why are you so gay? And you call me and stuff because, at the time, I didn't really know what those words meant, so it's even worse to know. that I don't even know what that means and you're just telling me all these negative terms, so besides liking why I'm here, I feel like I can share that openly with you because I feel like you've been able to open up that kind of safe space for me to be able to share it.

Yes, I'm very glad I was able to do it for you. Thanks thanks. I was arrested for attempted murder. They just caught me. in a nasty fight and at that moment I thought my best option was to kill him I was afraid and he was already injured so I decided to stab him to death but I couldn't finish the job fortunately um that was a miracle so they sent me to jail and for the grace of God I was freed. That was also a miracle in itself, but the real secret is that I used to be a person full of hatred and anger and I would be lying if I said. that I had stopped thinking about killing him and had let my anger and resentment get the best of me.

People look at me and think, "Oh, he's harmless, like he's not such a tough guy, he's not really going to hurt you." I'm hiding these demons that I don't want you to see, so yeah, after I got out of jail I felt a lot of remorse because I saw the pain and sadness it brought to my family and my mom had to sit me down. and she was disappointed in me and ashamed of me and it destroyed me, it was like a wake up call for me, it's like, damn Jonathan, you have a problem here, um, I ask God to forgive me, um, I actually I apologized to my victim and me.

I asked him to forgive me too, which was very hard to do, but I realized that I couldn't forgive myself and that I was having PTSD flashbacks. I couldn't sleep and seeing the moment he was bleeding on the floor writhing and cold and haunted me for a long time. I had a really good therapist who taught me how to manage anger. He helped me overcome my trauma. I got deep into journaling and am still on the journey right now. I'm improving a lot. In fact, I almost got fired from my job because I almost hit my coworker.

Sorry mom, uh, but I'm giving myself Grace because I'm proud of myself for not acting unhealed. version of myself that I have, so the main thing I had to learn was to have compassion and learn that it's okay, it's understandable that I was acting like that because of what I went through in my childhood, but teaching myself to rewind my brain to to learn that it is safe and that I am not in danger and I don't have to fight anymore. The reason I share this story is because I want anyone who shares a similar experience to know that you are not bad, you are not the villain, you are just hurt. and you are carrying a lot of pain but believe me when I tell you that you can heal and you can change just know that you are good and that you are still worthy of love guys you just hit the nail on the head I mean the grace the compassion. to you and everything you said you are such an inspiring man and I'm glad you shared it so thank you yeah for me I really related to that you were talking about you having anger issues yeah all my Family knows I have anger issues and that's how I have been.

I've been trying to deal with it in a few different ways, with the gym being my main one, which is like my main one, like everything you know, I collect everything that makes me angry. and it's like throwing wood into a furnace and then it all smokes, you know, yeah, I feel like I spent a lot of my life channeling anger, allowing it to feed and going to the gym and, you know, finding others. I also have ways to channel it. I have the boxer's fracture, you know, from punching walls too and um, I just want to say that it was when I stopped channeling that hate and that anger and stopped using it as my fire that my life really got better. better because there is a way to find this forgiveness, this Grace, this self-love, this self-respect and this recognition of this right Divine Purpose, and you put all of that together and you can channel it and you can become even stronger and push even more weight and strength. less walls, there is a journey to go and it takes time and it requires Grace, yes, sure, yes, it has been difficult to navigate my relationships and rebuild my life since I was sexually assaulted, so about two years ago I was a valet driver and one of My coworkers had asked me if I wanted to hang out, I had turned him down a couple of times and finally I was going out one night and he asked pH to hang out, you know, he said there were a couple of people coming over one night. pair. of his friends coming to his house so I said why not um and I got there and it was just the two of us and then I thought, you know, this is a little weird, you know, he said, uh, that his friends ended up hanging out, so I said Okay, I'll be out of here in an hour or two.

He had given me a drink. We started drinking a little bit and I was probably only one or two beers in and I started to feel completely drunk, like I'd drunk like five. or six or 10 beers, you know, completely intoxicated. The last thing I remember was passing out and I woke up and it was 13 hours later, I was in the hospital bed and I was pretty confused. The nurse comes over and says, "Hey, just wait a minute." They were watching me, they were taking me out there and I started remembering and I get snippets of you know, like little moments of you know, while I'm sleeping, being touched or grabbed and things like that.

And then, you know, she laughed, said. No, you just drank too much last night because I guess she had been there for so many hours, so they checked me out. I'm on my way out. I remember calling my mom. I just remember telling him that. Hey, mom, I think she had hit me. raped last night and I remember her initial response was she laughed and said uh no there's no way that could have happened um I don't know if that's the exact word she said but it was something like that and I just remember I exploded instantly and started to yelling on the phone, you know, I was yelling in front of the hospital as the day went on.

He kept remembering more and more of what had happened. I spoke to a couple of mental health experts. I spoke to a couple of police officers. but in the end they just sent me away and told me they would get someone to look into it and I felt pretty alone after that. I felt quite isolated. I just didn't feel right. I didn't feel like I was a person. It's definitely uh it's been two years and I've lost a couple of friends over that um my best friend who I haven't talked to in over a year and a half um um and I mean the truth is it's just because and The guy The guy who did that to me was gay and I had trusted him in that aspect and my best friend was gay, so it kind of carried over into that thing of oh, I can trust you, you know, as my best friend, you know, I've been able to trust him.

I liked sleeping in the same room as him. live in the same room as him. It's sad not to have you, not to have you in my life, friend, but I feel like the walls I've built. right now it protected me for a while, uh, but I'm trying to work on taking them down and for a long time I had hatred and just pure hatred in my heart, um, you know, I just have to get over that, um, it's just something you have to overcome and what you have to grow with, you know it's not going to leave me, yeah, my heart is with you, man.

I think we live in a really strange space in time where when men bring this to the table it's automatically dismissed and I'm sorry you're dealing with that and I think you know you're not alone. What has been hardest to overcome is being able to accept love. What I have realized is that no matter what happens, I will never be what I was before that moment, we have been hurt and we feel alone and isolated, you have to see that you are not, you know it and that for me has been the greatest sense. I hope you are brave to share that man.

I'm sorry you had that experience, but you are not alone. My sophomore and junior years I was sexually abused, raped, and sexually assaulted by four of my closest friends at separate times. It was a really dehumanizing experience for me, it was very isolating. I had just come out, so I didn't really have a lot of friends. My girlfriend and my best friend really saved my life and my best friend, Christian, really likes to redefine himself. what it's like to be a man um to me he's very he's like my brother and my girlfriend it was the first time I felt like someone could really love me as a man and that was really cool for me so they really saved me from those situations, but I always keep thinking about the things that happened to me so I just wanted to thank you all for sharing because I wouldn't have said that if you hadn't so thank you welcome thank you Z man you guys your bra. thank you sometimes I feel uncomfortable in a group of men I guess when I was a little boy that's when it started my mother was married to my father who was a problem drinker and they fought a lot in fact that's one of my earliest memories and um I guess she wasn't until I recently found out he hit her.

I never felt very masculine growing up. He was terrible at sports. I was afraid of balls and they harassed me. In fact, it wasn't until I was 19 that I stood up to any bully and actually got into fights with anyone, um, but I guess that's how it is for me. I always associate, I still associate masculinity with toxic masculinity. They tell me they are different. As I grew up, I actually have a doctor. I've been drinking more and more and when I'm in bars most of the customers are men, of course. Well, I've never witnessed a bar fight.

I guess there's always a thought in the back of my mind, maybe this is the only time when I go to this dive barreally see fists. Flies or glasses fly around the room and make me a little nervous. The early associations I have with my father and his drinking, or what has lent itself to it, lent itself to my feelings of being uncomfortable in groups of men. to this day my traumatic experiences are not as severe as the others we've heard, that's true and at the same time I also think it's one of those things where being in this group and realizing that we are willing to be vulnerable support each other um I think that's a side of men that we don't see I don't think we see it in the media I don't think we see it in entertainment maybe in the home maybe in private but I think this is an experience pretty unique to me and it's changed the way i look at it its true its okay i was raised by women mhm and my stepdad was just a monstrous monster of an abusive man and for years i was actually alone i'm terrified of guys like and i'm a big guy, like most people in general is the opposite of what I discovered in childhood is just constantly staying away from men in any capacity because the violence was so overwhelming that I was terrified. of any kind possible and that turned into a tremendous amount of violence at my own hands.

What's really interesting is Once Upon a Time. It was pure terror at the idea of ​​being seen in this space in any capacity and now it becomes freedom because I have realized that it is exactly the same thing that you mentioned, that we are all having a communal experience, that our definitions of masculinity are all different. I don't know if one is right or wrong, but in the end it's like you. I have to take inventory of your life and when I started doing that, it became a lot easier to be in spaces like this that were right for me growing up.

He was also very one-sided, the way he saw men was always very violent and the way he saw women was the exact opposite. I always went with my mom and my sisters for a kind year and I went with my brother if I wanted to fight him for fun and so it was always like I never knew anything. Otherwise, when I came out, it was very difficult for me to know how I was supposed to act because what I thought was a man was super violent, big and burly, that's all I knew and that's not me.

I'm not violent at all. I've never been in a fight in my life. I'm just not like that and for me it was necessary to look inside myself and discover that masculinity is whatever I define. I know I'm a man and I don't need to act like any other man to like being a man, but it's also like a big barrier. I feel very uncomfortable in the male spaces of MA, so I'm still working on getting into a mental space where I can know I'm allowed to be here, my past experiences with guys like my dad and other men like they're older than me like if they were just horrible to me and then I grew up being raised by my mom, my grandmother, my aunt, even my sister too, so a lot of the family members that I grew up with were women, so they taught me about life, they taught me how I should do things like today, walking here. and knowing that I'm going to be around a group of guys scared me because I was like, oh my gosh, like I can't, how am I supposed to talk to them, how am I supposed to interact with them, because a lot of My friends are girls and they're women, so I feel like the conversations I would have with my friends I probably wouldn't have with my friends much.

I think it's something I have to constantly work on at CU, knowing that I like it just because I like it. Some men are not what I expect them to be, it doesn't mean I have to maintain that perception of them. I was sexually abused in the church and my mom made me swear that she would never tell anyone that we grew up in the Mormon Church. which is super strange because we also grew up in the neighborhood and we were in poverty and if you look back, it's like this very strange experience of my mother and her drug addiction and the absence of my stepfather took us wherever and One night, when I was at the house of one of the church members, I was sexually abused and I thought that when that happened it was normal because I didn't know, I mean, because I was a child and you know, when you're inside, like me No.

I don't know fourth grade or something, you do one of those first classes like Good Touch Bad Touch and I was like, oh, this wasn't really good and I told my mom I'll never forget what she told me. she says you can never tell anyone this happened this didn't happen don't talk about this I understand the why behind this the church was incredibly like giving my family a lot of our food came from the pantry uh our rent was often paid with the tithes and I think the fear that she had was that if this was exposed we would lose that lifeline and I kept that secret for 27 years and what's really interesting about the secrets and the reason I was I'm willing to talk about this today It's because that secret ate me alive, I'm serious, it's probably because of a lot of really good things that have happened to me in my life, it was probably the worst, that's where I lost my childhood experience.

I mean, there are the cuts, the scars, the burns, and the physical and mental abuse I went through, but this was different. I was in survival mode. I was just trying to do whatever it took to survive day to day and that's how I started. I did drugs when I was 12 and I fought all the time and got involved with people and went down this path of self-destruction. Many people have asked me over the years how I feel when my mother tells me that and keeps that secret from me and keeps it from me. until I'm 27 and what I always come back to is that it's just the Human Experience.

I don't know what to say other than that and when I think about who I've become, there has been a tremendous amount of healing that had to happen in order for me to be here right now. I mean, the pain of that experience not only destroyed my life but put me in this place where I attempted suicide twice statistically. You can go to a website. It's called 1in6.org, one in six men has been sexually abused at some point in his life and it's the darkest secret we keep, so every time I talk about this it's me taking my power back a little more and that . and number six that you just said really stood out to me because I remember after the fact it definitely made me feel less alone, but at the same time I still felt isolated because you know it's something that you know as a man that you don't think that will happen to you. to you, you know?

And probably like a little child too. It's just hard when you're in it, you know, you don't think at all about the effects it has on your body and your mind. the actions that you have, you know, it's right after you do something that you realize, oh, that's how I did it because of this trauma that I experienced and it sucks looking back when you hurt people or when you push people away because of it. I like my experience. I was a kid and it was from someone in my family and we're obviously very close so I never told anyone, it's like you're a kid and you don't know what to do.

I don't know who to turn to, you know, and especially if it's someone who has the same power, you just don't want to ruin like you, you don't want to break any similar relationship, you think you're the only one. one who is going through it a little bit, do you know there are a lot of other men who have also gone through the same thing? You know, my heart goes out to you. I was younger, maybe third or fourth grade, we had a babysitter who was much older and he Take me to the back room and I was too afraid to tell him.

He was threatening. He was that age. He was the bogeyman. I mean, he was the thing that was under my bed and hiding in my closet at night. I went through this process of Rage where I wanted to murder this guy, forgiveness is huge, it's the most important part, you guys and you have to do it right because the way I did it at first was I imagined strangling him in my imagination and holding him down. . and stabbing him until he died and feeling his life leave his body and once I finally felt like he was gone from this Earth.

I left him in the river and watched him float away and I really thought that was my way of forgiving. them and all I was doing was just filling myself with violent thoughts and rage and it would show up in other places in my life with alcoholism and fist fights that we talked about understanding my journey in this life and removing that person and from the From the bottom of my heart forgiving him, not for him, I will never tell him that I don't even know who he is and it was like a building was lifted off my shoulders and um, I didn't talk about it for 20 years and so on. he said, I mean, talking about it heals it without forgiveness and without really talking about it and coming together like we are. um, you know, I wouldn't be where I am today the older I get and the more work I do and the more I like to look at myself in the mirror, I think that it's not up to me, that I'm not guilty of the worst thing that's happened to me in life. life, but what's so interesting and the truth about why I decided to share this is because I'm like there's like 10 of us here and four of us are here right now, what does that tell you?

You know, it's not one and six like I don't care what that statistic says, I know a lot more men who would never stand here, right? Now I just want to say I'm proud of you guys this sucks man but this is how you free yourself safely and this is how you free the kids behind you who are terrified yeah CU eventually people will follow you. behind you, I really appreciate you for sharing your story because like you said, you know talking really helps you control your life and helps you maintain and have almost like you have power over that right instead of those kind of nightmares.

It was my life, so thank you all for sharing your bitterness. I appreciate it, thank you, thank you for being brave, thank you all for being brave. I have never had an experience like this. I'll remember it, you know, for the rest of my life. How many times do we hear today that I wouldn't have said that if you hadn't stated the first correct facts and do you think this is going to set a precedent for other people to do the same? That's the power of vulnerability to make sure you give other people permission to open up when they see you doing the same thing.

Why not a little brotherly love here? Never hurt anyone. Yes, thanks guys. Thanks man. It is a beautiful experience with you. Thank you all.