Dealing With 'The Feelings' As a Young Brown Person

Break-ups are a trip. At best they can be clean, necessary, appropriately timed. But most of the time they’re awkward, messy and difficult. They chew up your time and brain space, they gnaw at you from the inside out. They plague you with feelings of guilt, regret, shame, self doubt –  and the worst part is: the person you’d normally turn to has gone.

But how do we move through these feelings? How do we even begin to navigate our way through heartbreak?

These are big, universal questions that sit heavily on a lot of young people who haven’t had to ask them before. For young Māori and Pacific people, the questions can become compounded with complexity, as we’re forced to unpack the ways in which the world has shaped their identity. 

I’d probably say that my brand at primary school was “the kid who cried a lot”.

There was the kid who couldn’t eat pineapple, the kid who vomited all the time, and me, the kid who cried a lot. And while for a great part of my life this would have been something I hid away from, it’s become somewhat of a badge of honour for me.

A number of things come to mind when I think of what made me truly weep as a pre-teen. From the death of the great WWE wrestler Eddie Guerrero, to the first time I was broken up with over MSN, to the untimely injury-induced retirement of WWE wrestler Dave Batista, to the sudden and inexplicable discontinuation of hit Nickelodeon series Zoey 101. My tender little heart was ever but a gentle breeze away from shattering. 

It’s unbelievably normal for human beings to cry. It’s as primal and natural as laughing, or farting, or laughing at farting. And yet, as I grew up, I came to develop a sense of shame around expressing myself.

People raised with the expectations of masculine gender ideals, like myself, aren't often encouraged to cry. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that it’s discouraged. Rangatahi Māori and young Pacific people are also raised with colonial ideas of gender (i.e. God is a white man and all social structures must defer to that dynamic) or heightened, exoticised ideas of what a brown man should be; often staunch, tough and unshakeable.

And so, for our boys, emotions are often relegated to being something that only happens in response to a catalyst. Something that happens when there’s no other option. When there’s no moment to slap the knee and say “ah well.” And, following a lifetime of being discouraged to talk about how we feel, we enter the big wide world of adult romance, unarmed against the trials of emotional communication. 

I consider myself a “good” communicator, emotionally speaking.

As a comedian and filmmaker, getting #deep and interrogating my feelings is a big part of what I do. I spend a lot of time around artists (pray for me) and there’s lots of (painfully) earnest conversations about the struggles of that existence. Chasing paychecks! Personal integrity! The desire to change the world! Heavy stuff.  Navel-gazing stuff. 

And yet what I have found is, in moments of genuine struggle – be it when I’m challenged by my partner, or confronted with my own shortcomings, grappling with feelings of shame and inadequacy — the most surreal thing happens. I freeze, I retreat, I get quiet and spiral. My brain feels like it’s been taken from my head, scrubbed clean and put back. Everything, all of it, gone. Suddenly my big smarty-pants brain, with all its big smarty-pants words and ideas, is unable to retain a single thought. Like holding water in a colander. I recently discovered this is actually a very common emotional reaction. 

Shutting down is a physiological response. The brain shuts down as a protective measure when our nervous system gets too overwhelmed.  Effects can range from a loss of focus, an inability to think straight, and some can often feel dizzy or disoriented by the sensation. It’s objectively an awful feeling.

Shutting down can make you feel helpless, scared, and useless. This loss of control, paired with the “masculine” idea that I should be retaining control, generates a nice healthy whirlwind of self-hatred and doubt.

My upbringing has taught me that I should have answers, I should be able to show up and deliver. Falling short of the mark on these things, telling yourself you’re “not enough of a man” is a slippery slope — one that could quite easily lead you down a dangerous path of solitude and rage. This fear can make us fragile and defensive, and often leads to us being unable to process being challenged. It’s incredibly valuable for us to slow down; to be able to hear criticism and reflect on it, rather than to default to defensiveness.

We, as brown men, have a responsibility to keep ourselves and our peers in check, to ensure the safety of our loved ones and those around us. The spiral of self-hatred is serving no one, including yourself. It’s important to remember to be soft.

Softness, in a western context, is not something we typically associate with masculinity.

But every day in my family and communities I see examples of innate softness in our tāne. A lot of our Pasifika cultural values of service, respect and loyalty lend themselves well to that kind of softness. And in fact, this western framework of masculine independence quite often bumps and scrapes at the edges of our collective communal values.

To be soft, in this sense, is to be delicate with yourself, your elders, your loved ones and the loved ones of your loved ones. For many peoples across the world, whose culture and existence have been impacted by colonisation, one of the most effective means of dealing with these issues is with laughter. I sometimes joke on stage that brown kids cry the best because they’re not just crying for themselves, they’re crying for their ancestors as well. Same goes for laughter. When brown people laugh together it’s a shared, connective joy, resonant with generations of displaced whakapapa. We laugh because our joy is in defiance of those who tried to assimilate or erase us. We laugh in spite of all the reasons we have to cry. 

And so softness, in communal contexts, presents itself as joy. A loud, hearty acknowledgement of your pain, and a deeper, unspoken understanding, that that same pain is shared, and that you aren’t alone in feeling it. The answer is community. A flowing, organic, multi-faceted ecosystem of which you are a part. 

Our solution to our problems lies in the people around us. Contrary to the brooding, hyper-macho, lone-wolf doctrine of masculinity, the key to being soft is to ask for help from your people and to communicate when you’re struggling.

It’s also important to acknowledge that these connections must exist both ways. We, as members of our community, have the responsibility to create space for our loved ones to experience the softness we ask of them. Many indigenous cultures believe in systems of reciprocity — that we are accountable for what we take — and that as part of an ecosystem we must return in kind that which we have taken. This applies also to community support.

Very often it is the brown wahine in our lives who tend to take on the role of emotional supporter. We look to our wives, girlfriends, mothers, aunties, sisters and cousins to hold us and care for us — even in the face of holding us accountable for our carelessness. But who do they turn to? It would appear, in our masculine desire to remain silent, our apathy and carelessness is harming the women in our lives. This ever-constant, ever-moving exchange of love has to be mutual for it to sustain. We can’t let our shame get in the way of us creating and nurturing space for our loved ones to express grief and hurt. I myself have been guilty of neglecting a lot of these lines, and doing so in brown communities can leave people feeling alienated. Even more so in brown relationships. 

People often view dependency in relationships as existing on a binary of “independent” and “codependent” but, in reality, relationships work best when all parties are both providing and using support. Of course these things aren’t set in stone. Our needs shift and the ratio of support given to support required will inevitably fluctuate. But the way to move through this healthily is to be aware of our feelings, to be sensitive to our limits, and to those of your partner. And we can’t do that without telling them.

To be soft is to slow down. It’s not just about checking in with yourself, it’s about checking yourself. Part of this process is acknowledging that your emotions aren't a thing that you control, only a thing that you either show or hide. Emotions impact us physically, they change our heart rate, blood pressure and our brain chemistry. We don’t control how we emotionally respond. But what we can do is get better at identifying it, and expressing it. 

The reason we are (or more specifically, I am) talking about these things is because break-ups can be a very emotionally turbulent time for most people. Every time we enter a new relationship, we commit to giving someone our trust, and asking for it in kind, with that trust growing deeper over time. It’s vulnerable, it’s scary. But, in the best case, it’s where love comes from. To know someone intimately and to be known intimately. To be able to read them, and feel comfortable knowing that they will be able to read you too. And so to lose someone to whom you were so deeply connected to can feel like the rug has been pulled out beneath you. Getting over break-ups can be, for many, a grieving process.

I always thought grief was just temporary sadness, but as I hurtle towards my late twenties, I realise that grief is ongoing. The lessons of loss reveal themselves to us constantly over the course of the rest of our lives and in the softness we give ourselves permission and openness to receive those lessons.

For young brown men experiencing heartbreak, it’s easy to equate sadness with failure. To equate loss with failure. To equate that failure with our self-worth.

When we face heartbreak it’s easy to blame ourselves; especially measured against the metrics of our perceived expectations. Many young Māori and Pasifika deal with all of these struggles on top of grappling with power dynamics imposed on them in regards to race and gender. Hegemonic masculinity is harmful, and it’s essential that our men do the mahi in challenging their own ideas and values around these dynamics.

These patriarchal dynamics benefit us. We still have privilege in this world, and wielding that privilege can come at the cost of the safety of others. It’s vital for us to assess how our engagement with it impacts the women and gender diverse people in our lives.

Inevitably, when we go through a break-up, we’re going to challenge ourselves and reflect on what went wrong. That’s normal, that’s healthy. Self-reflection and growth in the aftermath of the break-up is natural, and that looks different for many people. But we mustn’t measure ourselves against someone else’s yardstick. These imposed ideas of masculinity, as it exists on a binary, don’t abide by our cultural values and experiences, and they sure as hell don’t dictate our value. We do. On our own terms. Our value is determined by us; by the people around us, by the people we stand for. 

In the messy, confusing aftermath of a break-up, it can feel like we’ve been cast into outer space without a tether. It can make us feel vulnerable and lonely — like a little kid bawling his eyes out because his favourite TV show has been cancelled. Be soft to that kid. Be soft to the people in your life. Be soft to yourself.

Bailey Poching is a comedian, actor and writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau.

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