Someone left a comment on one of my videos last month.
A paragraph. No punctuation. Full rage.
He told me I was destroying the very fabric of civilisation by encouraging men to process their emotions. Men needed to keep the stiff upper lip. People like me were hippies. The whole thing.
Two years ago, that would have knocked me sideways.
This time I laughed.
Not because it wasn't pointed at something real.
Not because I dismiss the man or what he was feeling when he wrote it.
But because I've done enough work now that there's some space between the thing landing and what I do next. I got to choose what to do in that space.
That's not immunity. That's distance.
The difference matters. Immunity would mean the comment didn't register. It registered. I read it twice. I sat with it for a moment. But there was a gap between the stimulus and my response, and in that gap I had a choice I didn't use to have.
I laughed. Not at him. At the recognition.
Because the man who writes a paragraph of unpunctuated fury at a video about emotional intelligence is not my enemy.
He's a man whose entire identity is built around emotional suppression, and someone just turned up on his screen and told him that suppression is optional.
Of course, he pushed back.
The alternative would be to sit with the possibility that he's spent thirty or forty years maintaining a version of himself that wasn't quite right. That the thing he called strength was, in part, avoidance. That the armour he was so proud of was also keeping things out that he actually needed.
That's an uncomfortable seat. I know that seat. I sat in it.
The work doesn't make you bulletproof. It doesn't mean nothing lands anymore. It means you build just enough space between the stimulus and your response that you start to notice: there's a choice in there. Not always. Not immediately. But more often than you used to.
Two years ago, a comment like that would have had me questioning everything.
Whether I was doing the right thing.
Whether the real version of me was too much for a public platform.
Now I read it, and I think: that's exactly who I'm making this for.
Not the man who's already done the work. The man who'd write that comment. The man who'd never watch a video like this, who stumbled across it by accident, who felt something shift very slightly in a direction he couldn't name, and whose first instinct was to attack the feeling rather than sit with it.
He probably closed the tab. Maybe left the comment first. Either way, he knows what he felt.
The question I'd offer you:
Where are you still flinching rather than laughing?
Not as a criticism. As a signal. The flinch is information. It's pointing at something that still has a hook in you, an idea that hasn't been properly examined yet, a version of yourself that still needs defending.
The work isn't to stop flinching entirely. It's to build enough space between the flinch and what you do next that you get a say in it.
That's the distance. That's what I'm working on.
Paul
