r.h. Sin’s poetry has urged women toward their own worth — and toward the door, when a relationship no longer deserves them. This spring, he turned to the men in his audience and told them to go to therapy.

With his own years in and out of therapy, he reflects on the things he still finds hard to surrender, and the insidious harm of pretending to be fine.

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Yarrow: This spring you told men to go to therapy, and you know what that asks of Black men specifically, to hand their pain to a stranger, in a country that’s given them little reason to trust it will be handled gently. What would you say to the man who heard you, agreed, and still decides it’s safer to keep carrying everything alone? 

Sin: I genuinely understand the man who continues to carry things alone. I have been him so often in my own life, and while I’ve been in therapy, on and off, for about a decade, sadly there have been one or two things that I just felt I needed to keep to myself — reluctant to fully give in, afraid to surrender, carrying fear around things that would possibly be fully worked through and pushed into a process of healing if I would just open up.

Choosing to walk alone is becoming a burden to yourself.

I say to that man — the one who has decided to conceal the things that weigh him down the most — that the only way to truly live is to seek help. The only way to fully love is to begin the process of healing the wounds that, more times than not, have been divisive in one’s own destruction. I say to that man that the only way to fully appreciate love in all forms, and the establishment of true connection to just about anything, can only occur when one has decided to free themselves from withholding their emotional truths.

The odd thing I discovered about keeping it all in is that I was actually forcing myself to experience all the things I’d been running from in the first place. You see, choosing to walk alone is becoming a burden to yourself. Choosing to go it alone is a self-destructive pattern that keeps you stuck; it reduces everything you are and keeps you from becoming all the things you’d hope to be. I was literally running backwards, on fumes. Performing strength — not knowing that there is power in observing weakness, pain, and sadness. There is power in admitting “I’m not okay” and doing something about it.

I was literally running backwards, on fumes. Performing strength — not knowing that there is power in observing weakness.

Worst of all, keeping it all in doesn’t protect the people who are close to you. Keeping it to yourself just forces those feelings to come out in different ways — mostly harmful to anyone you believe you care about. And deep down, who wants to do that? Who wants to show up that way — half, maybe less — instead of experiencing a level of wholeness that can only come from speaking to someone, being honest about what hurts, and moving in a direction of healing.

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Yarrow: bell hooks wrote that boys give up the right to feel as the price of becoming men. Where do you think a mans pain goes when he’s spent years pretending it isn’t there?

Sin: bell hooks, always brilliant in observation, I’ve been reading her books as of late for refreshers. For me, I think the pain sits right behind the eyes and at the lining of the heart. The pain also attaches itself to the energy of a man, his aura.

I know this to be true because of how painful it had been to look at someone I truly love, the way this person held up a mirror to me, reflecting everything I was trying to hide and how in that reflection, as I caught my own eyes, I saw all the pain I thought I’d hidden so well.

It sits behind the eyes in such a way that if you were to look at yourself too long, the tears would begin and so, when we, men, are holding pain, hidden anguish, we try our hardest no to look into the mirror. And this can be accomplished in so many ways. 

I understand that the pain also sits in the lining of the heart because every time I tried to give myself fully to my beloved, there was a sharp pain followed by this invisible barrier… making it harder to fully embrace such a beautiful feeling, thus causing me to become a bit distant, afraid of what the pain would do but also, what it would reveal. And the energy, the aura, the way the pain sits inside of ones presence, eventually showing itself with low vibrational actions or reactions.

Ultimately, the pain isn’t hidden long enough to not cause some level of damage, to both the man and the ones who care about him.