The Mask Men Wear: Why Hiding Struggles Makes Us Weaker
The Modern Man’s Performance
There’s a strange irony in being a man today.
We live in a time when society tells us it’s good to talk, that mental health matters, that vulnerability is strength. Yet at the same time, many voices celebrate toughness, composure, and quiet resilience as if that’s what separates the “real men” from everyone else.
Most men I know walk that tightrope every single day. They go to work, help take care of their families, handle their responsibilities, and try to project an image of competence and control. Inside, though, many are quietly exhausted. They’re not just tired from the pace of life but from the effort of holding it all together, of keeping the mask in place.
That mask says, I’m fine. It says, I can handle it. It says, I don’t need help.
It’s a performance we learn early. We see it in our fathers, our teachers, our coaches, and in the characters on screen who never crack. And as boys grow into men, that act solidifies into identity. The mask becomes who we think we’re supposed to be.
But it’s heavy. And the longer we wear it, the more it warps the person underneath.
The truth is that a lot of men are struggling. Not because they’re weak, but because they’ve been told they’re not allowed to struggle in the first place. When that pain, anxiety, or fear inevitably arrives (as it does for everyone), they have nowhere to put it. So they push it down. They isolate. They pretend.
And in doing so, they become weaker, not stronger.
That’s the quiet crisis behind the statistics we see around men’s mental health and suicide, and it’s why conversations like this need to happen far more often. Not as lectures, not as slogans, but as honest reflections. Because strength isn’t silence. It’s honesty.
The Source of the Mask
The roots of this conditioning go deep.
For generations, men’s roles were clearly defined: protector, provider, breadwinner. A man’s worth was measured in productivity and performance, in what he could earn, build, or defend. Those roles made sense in the context of the world at the time, but the world has changed dramatically since then.
As Richard Reeves points out in Of Boys and Men, the traditional male script hasn’t evolved nearly as quickly as the world around it. Women have (rightfully and powerfully) stepped into more visible and influential roles across every sector of society, including education, leadership, science, politics, and business. But men, collectively, haven’t been given a new script. The old one still says: Be strong. Don’t complain. Provide.
And when that version of success slips out of reach (as it inevitably does for many), it leaves a vacuum. Men are left wondering, If I’m not thriving as the provider, then what am I? What purpose do I serve?
That uncertainty can turn into frustration or despair.
Modern culture doesn’t help much either. We’re surrounded by mixed messages. On one hand, we celebrate emotional intelligence and encourage openness. On the other, we still mock or minimise men who show it. The “house husband” character is usually a punchline. The dad trying to parent tenderly is “adorable” but not serious.
Even in male friendships, jokes often replace honesty. Sarcasm and banter stand in for connection. It’s not that men don’t care for each other, it’s that they’ve been taught not to show it.
Then there’s the louder, angrier corner of modern culture, the one that calls for a “return to real masculinity,” preaching domination, hierarchy, and control. The Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons of the world tell young men that being “alpha” is the cure for uncertainty, that to be respected they must be feared, that women are competitors rather than equals.
It’s the same mask, just painted in harsher colours.
And it’s still a trap.
The Internal Echo
Even when the external pressure eases, the internal voice remains.
That voice says, I should be tougher than this.
It says, I’m letting people down by struggling.
It whispers, If they knew how messy my head really is, they’d lose respect for me.
So instead of processing emotion, we analyse it. We intellectualise pain. We look for the quick fix, the distraction, the justification. Anything but the raw truth of I’m scared or I’m sad or I don’t know what to do.
The mask becomes self-policing. It no longer needs an audience; it’s internalised.
And while that might work for a while, especially for driven, high-performing men, it eventually collapses. You can’t outrun emotion forever. What doesn’t get expressed will find another way out. Sometimes it leaks as irritability or withdrawal. Sometimes it explodes as anger. Sometimes it just drains the colour from everything until nothing feels meaningful anymore.
This is where depression often hides. Not in tears or dramatic breakdowns, but in quiet disconnection. In the man who stops reaching out, who stops laughing, who seems fine but isn’t.
I’ve been there.
During culinary school, the pressure and constant self-criticism caught up with me. I couldn’t process the stress or express what I was feeling, and eventually it swallowed me whole. I slipped into a deep depression and ended up withdrawing partway through the program, adding one more unfinished thing to a growing list of “failures” in my head.
It was only luck that my doctor at the time had connections that got me into a clinical trial for a new antidepressant. The medication helped, but what really pulled me through were the weekly counselling sessions that came with it. For the first time, I started to understand how my own thoughts and silence were feeding the spiral.
That wasn’t the last time I brushed up against that edge. In the decades since, there have been several moments when I could feel myself sliding again. Each time, something helped me steer out of it, sometimes by choice, sometimes by chance. A career change in early 2005 gave me a fresh start and renewed purpose. Later that year, I began my own health and fitness journey, which became a crucial outlet for stress and self-doubt.
But even that tool had its limits. When I broke my ankle in 2016, and again during the strange neurological issues I dealt with throughout 2023, being unable to train felt like having my safety valve sealed shut. Both times, I spiralled hard, convinced I’d never get back to doing the things that grounded me.
And of course, there were the wild highs and lows of entrepreneurship. Since going fully self-employed in 2018, I’ve ridden waves that could sink even the most resilient mindset. The pandemic nearly did. Keeping the business afloat through lockdowns and debt stretched me past my limit more than once.
I’ve managed to stay off antidepressants since that first episode, but it’s been close a few times. What’s kept me going isn’t some superhuman toughness; it’s the willingness to keep adjusting, to use every skill and tool I’ve built along the way, and to keep talking when the silence starts to feel dangerous.
That said, I want to be clear that there’s no badge of honour in doing it without medication. Antidepressants, therapy, and other forms of support save lives every single day. They saved mine once. Whether your toolbox includes medication, movement, mindfulness, or all of the above, what matters most is using what works and asking for help when you need it.
The mask isn’t armour. It’s a wall. And every wall, left long enough, becomes a prison.
A Glimpse Behind the Mask
For over a decade, I had the privilege of knowing someone who showed me what it looked like to live without that wall. His name was Stanford.
He was a friend, colleague, and peer, but also something of a mentor. A grounded, capable man with no need for alpha posturing. He led through calm example, steady, thoughtful, and quick to help. Professionally, he inspired me. Personally, he anchored me.
We shared everything from philosophical discussions about life and purpose to late-night troubleshooting sessions fuelled by music and caffeine. When either of us was wrestling with something heavy, we talked. No pretense, no filters, just honesty. Sometimes we went deep. Sometimes we just sat in silence and let the music do the talking.
He was, in the truest sense, a safe space.
When he passed away unexpectedly, that anchor vanished. The loss was devastating, not only because of who he was, but because of what he represented: the one person with whom I could be completely unguarded.
Instead of learning to be open more broadly, I had used that relationship as a kind of loophole. He was my outlet, the exception that allowed me to keep up the facade everywhere else.
When he was gone, the mask snapped back into place, tighter than before.
Not long after, the world shut down. COVID arrived, businesses closed, uncertainty took over, and suddenly everyone was isolated. For me, it was a perfect storm. I was already grieving, already off balance, and now stripped of routine, community, and direction.
Those months were dark. The thoughts that used to dissolve through conversation had nowhere to go. They circled endlessly in my head until they hardened into anxiety and despair. I kept showing up, doing the work, maintaining the image, but inside, I was unravelling.
Eventually, I clawed my way through, but I made myself a quiet promise: I can’t do it like that again.
If I wanted to survive the next storm, I needed to find healthier outlets, to build more than one anchor.
The Spiral and the Shift
That resolve didn’t flip a switch overnight. It started small.
A conversation here, a check-in there. I began opening up more to people who’d earned my trust: my friend Josh, a former long-time client who’s become one of those rare voices that can challenge and ground me, and my more recent friend Ken (known to many as “Spanky”), whose directness and humour often cut through my self-doubt when I need it most.
And of course, my wife, Raina. She has always been my greatest supporter, but also the hardest person to be vulnerable with. There’s a strange paradox in that. I know she loves me completely, yet part of me still worries that if she really sees all my fears, she’ll realise I’m not the strong, capable partner she deserves. It’s a ridiculous fear, but a very human one.
That inner narrative, the need to appear strong even to the people who love us most, runs deep. It’s the same voice that says, Don’t be a burden.
So sometimes, instead of speaking, I write.
For me, journaling alone doesn’t create enough distance to gain perspective. But writing publicly (through this blog and through my newsletter) forces me to take the swirling thoughts in my head and turn them into something tangible. Once it’s on the page, it stops bouncing around internally. It’s out there in the light, where I can look at it clearly.
That doesn’t make the feelings disappear. The weight doesn’t lift. But it becomes defined. Grounded. And somehow that makes it easier to carry.
I don’t feel lighter. I just feel real.
And when I’m real, I’m less likely to crumble under the pressure of pretending.
Redefining Strength (and What Stoicism Really Means)
The old narrative tells men that strength is silence, that real men keep it together no matter what. But that’s not strength. That’s suppression.
True strength is the ability to feel deeply, to stay composed without disconnecting, and to keep moving forward even when emotion threatens to overwhelm you. It’s acknowledging the storm without letting it sink you.
That, in fact, is the heart of real Stoicism, something often misunderstood in today’s culture.
Modern caricatures of Stoicism make it seem like emotional numbness: the idea that a Stoic man feels nothing, shows nothing, and endures everything with an unbreakable poker face. But that’s not Stoicism at all. The great Stoic philosophers (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca) never said we shouldn’t feel. They said we must feel, but we must not be ruled by those feelings.
Seneca wrote that emotion is natural and necessary, but that indulging it to the point of paralysis is what causes suffering. Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations, reminded himself daily to observe emotion, not suppress it; to recognise fear, anger, or grief as part of the human experience, not signs of weakness.
Real Stoicism isn’t about being unfeeling. It’s about being self-aware. It’s the practice of responding rather than reacting.
That perspective saved me more than once.
There were nights during the pandemic when anxiety clawed at my chest so fiercely that I could hardly breathe. My mind ran wild with what-ifs: What if I lose the business? What if I can’t hold up my end of things for my family? What if I let everyone down?
In those moments, remembering those Stoic lessons didn’t erase the fear, but it helped me sit with it. I could acknowledge it without letting it drive the bus. I could say, This is fear. It’s here. It will pass. What can I do right now that helps?
That’s not suppression. That’s strength with awareness.
And it’s the kind of strength we need to start modelling more openly.
Why Hiding Makes Us Weaker
The irony is that the harder we try to protect others from our struggles, the more those struggles end up controlling us. The energy it takes to hide pain is enormous. It drains focus, patience, creativity, and empathy. It makes us brittle.
When we finally do break, it’s often not the “big thing” that cracks us. It’s the small, final straw, the missed call, the careless comment, the unwashed dish, that tips us over because we’ve spent months pretending everything was fine.
I’ve seen this play out in my own coaching work too. The people who seem the most disciplined and stoic on the surface are often the ones who carry the deepest self-doubt underneath. They’re afraid to admit they’re struggling with motivation, with guilt, with feeling “less than.”
When they finally open up, something remarkable happens. The progress they make, physically, mentally, and emotionally, accelerates. Not because they’ve found a magic solution, but because they’ve stopped wasting energy maintaining the illusion of perfection.
That’s when real growth begins.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a client say, “I thought I was the only one who felt like this.” That sentence alone is proof of how isolating the mask can be. Yet once someone opens up, it gives permission for others to do the same. The room changes. Shoulders drop. Conversations deepen.
That’s what community should look like. That’s what strength actually is.
The Nudge Forward
So here’s my nudge to you.
If you’re reading this and some part of it feels uncomfortably familiar, take that as a sign that you’re not as alone as you think. Every man I know has moments when he questions whether he’s doing enough, being enough, or holding it together well enough.
You don’t have to fix that overnight. You don’t even have to talk about it publicly. But start somewhere.
Check in on a friend you haven’t heard from in a while. Send a message that says, “Hey, how are you really doing?” Or if you’re the one carrying something heavy, reach out before the silence gets too loud.
It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human.
The mask might make you look strong from the outside, but it isolates you from the inside. Taking it off isn’t surrender; it’s maintenance. It’s how you stop the cracks before they split you open.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s how we start building a version of masculinity that doesn’t rely on pretending.
Need to Talk?
If you’re struggling or just need someone to listen, please reach out. You can contact me directly through the Contact Us page. I’m always happy to have a chat and help point you toward helpful resources.
For those of you here in British Columbia or anywhere across Canada, there are also free, confidential support lines available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:
1-800-SUICIDE
If you or someone you know is in crisis, this line provides confidential support for anyone feeling suicidal or concerned about someone else.
Call 1-800-784-2433 (toll-free in B.C.)
Call or text 9-8-8 (toll-free across Canada)
Mental Health and Information Support Line
Connects callers experiencing a mental-health crisis to a B.C. crisis line without waiting or busy signals. This number also offers emotional support and referrals to appropriate services.
Call 310-6789 (no area code needed in B.C.)
You’re not alone, and reaching out is a sign of strength, not weakness.
And if you’d like to support my Move for Movember campaign, raising funds and awareness for men’s mental health, suicide prevention, and prostate and testicular cancer, here are the links:
👉 Donate via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/donate/4327774960878267/
👉 Or directly on my Movember MoSpace page: https://movember.com/m/15369756?mc=1
Every dollar, every kilometre, and every conversation matters.