The artifact for this chapter is the nine-medication list already entered into the record in Reel Five — Prazosin, Trazodone, Venlafaxine, Lurasidone, Auvelity, Adderall, Hydroxyzine, Propranolol, Alprazolam — filed here a second time, under a different light. REM Sleep Disorder, PTSD-adjacent trauma processing, treatment-resistant depression, ADHD-related cognitive disruption, acute anxiety: these clinical realities existed inside my body during the same stretch of time I received the highest performance distinction at Amazon, built a nonprofit, showed up for my daughter, and wrote this series. The list did not go away because the achievements arrived. Both were happening in the same body, simultaneously.
What men don't talk about is not that they suffer. It's that they suffer while performing capability, and the performance is so complete that even the people closest to them often don't know. I know men doing that right now. I was one of them. The difference is that I am choosing, in this chapter, to enter it as testimony — a formal account given because the person carrying the weight is the only one positioned to describe it accurately, and because the performance itself is a kind of signal jamming: it transmits competence and nothing underneath.
I grew up watching the men around me get consumed by the criminal justice system, by addiction, by a specific silence that looks like strength until it doesn't. I made a decision I was not going to reproduce that.
There is a version of this silence that runs through Black male experience in America specifically — taught not explicitly but in the accumulated texture of what gets praised and what gets ridiculed, that need is a liability and vulnerability is a target. No infrastructure was ever built, in the world I grew up in, to carry a signal like I am not okay out of a man's body and into a record anyone else could read. The occupation here is the absence itself: generations of men transmitting on a frequency nobody built a receiver for, so the signal just degrades, unheard, inside the person sending it.
I am writing from a position between the inherited silence and whatever comes after it — fluent in exactly what it costs to perform capability over a dysregulated nervous system, native to neither the old refusal to name it nor some easy fluency in naming it that I have not actually earned yet. The help looks like a doctor adjusting a prescription list for the better part of a year. It looks like therapy that is more about putting in order what has been out of order for a long time. And it looks like this chapter — a signal transmitted in public, on purpose, in case someone else carrying something similar needs proof the frequency exists.
I do not know if saying this out loud, once, in one chapter, undoes years of the opposite habit. I suspect it does not, not completely. I am choosing to send the signal anyway, aware that I may be the only one who ever confirms it was received.