How do men usually avoid feeling? Pain hurts. So men have lots of ways we escape. To not feel. Some men get obsessed with making or spending money. Some men work extra hard to seem tough, to thug their feelings out of them. I used to use women. Not sex so much, just the attention and affection of women.
Alcohol and weed are probably the most popular things Black men use to avoid feeling. They are designed to numb your emotions. Weed and alcohol are like the stuff doctors and dentists give before surgery (anesthesia), so the patient doesn’t feel anything.
Imagine for moment, you are training a young boxer. You want him to be the best fighter in the world, so y’all jog, lift weights, work on his hooks, uppercuts, and footwork. But you don’t want him to get hurt. So you give him medicine to numb his body while he trains. This way, he can get jabbed in the jaw 20 times and never feel any pain. But he needs to feel the pain.
You are crippling him by numbing him, not helping him. Getting hit and feeling pain is the best way he’ll learn to move faster or defend himself. When it’s time for the real fight he won’t be ready. Just like a lot of men who use weed and alcohol to numb their emotions.
