I’ve wanted to write about healing for a while now and kept putting it off, not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because I couldn’t find the right words for it. When I finally published “We Heal Differently,” it came from something I’d actually lived through in this rebuild.
I used to run from intimacy, from relationships altogether, and for a long time I didn’t examine why. I had somewhere else to go instead, some form of escape that was doing the emotional work relationships were supposed to do.
Once that escape stopped paying off, I had to face what I was avoiding and actually name it. That’s most of what We Heal Differently was about.
But there’s a harder thought underneath that one, and it’s less comfortable to say out loud: I’m not sure love, as I understood it growing up, still exists in the shape it used to.
What I see now looks more like need dressed up as affection. This isn’t a judgment I’m handing down from outside the generation I’m part of. It’s closer to a pattern I keep noticing, in the people around me and in what keeps surfacing online, and I don’t think I’m the only one seeing it.
What looks like connection is often just a transaction wearing the language of feeling.
Media has rewired how an entire generation approaches relationships, and the shift shows up in stories that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
A teenager pulled into online fraud because it’s the fastest route to the money he thinks he needs just to be wanted.
Partners turning violent over infidelity instead of simply walking away, treating each other as property rather than people.
People publicly performing their bodies and availability for attention, because the people watching reward it.
Fourteen-year-olds are already depressed, dealing with brain fog, and caught in addictions they don’t fully understand yet.
While some teenagers are trying to find their way out and refocus on their studies, others are simply seeking entertainment and validation for the habit rather than someone to challenge it.
I’m aware this is a departure from the kind of journal entry I usually write here, and I want to be clear about something before I close it. I’m not interested in policing how anyone chooses to live. That was never the purpose of this rebuild, and it still isn’t. People will do what they’re going to do, and my rebuild was never meant to be a verdict on theirs.
Men will keep being men until they choose to change, and that choice was never going to be mine to make for them.
What I can do is name what I’m observing, the same way I’ve tried to name everything else this year, my routines, my habits, my reactions, my faith, my work.
Naming it doesn’t fix it. But it’s the only starting point I’ve ever actually seen work.
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