The Sacred Practice of Becoming Through Showing Up
There’s a point in every man’s life where he has to face himself—not the version he shows the world, but the one he hides behind anger, performance, toughness, or silence. I hit that point hard. Not once, but several times. Each time, life stripped away another layer of ego until I had no choice but to sit with the truth of who I was and who I wasn’t. And somewhere in that mess—in the shame, the heartbreak, the therapy sessions and the sleepless nights—I finally began to find the man underneath.
This is the story of that journey.
Not a victory lap, not a confession—just the honest path of a man learning to be fierce without being cruel, gentle without being passive, kind without abandoning himself, and whole enough to love without fear.
1. The First Cracks
When I was in my early twenties, I had a quiet conversation with my then sister-in-law that ended up being one of the most important of my entire life. We had just spent two weeks with her, her husband, and their newborn daughter. It was a time I genuinely enjoyed. But sitting at their dining room table, I found myself unsettled by an uncomfortable truth: I didn’t want marriage. I didn’t want children. And I didn’t know why.
I brought this up in conversation—it was just the two of us—and my sister-in-law turned to me and said, “That’s because you have unresolved childhood issues,” and returned to what she was doing. Not only was I deeply offended—I’d been to therapy and plus, who didn’t?—but I thought it was a laughably simple answer. It couldn’t possibly be that and she was obviously wrong. Spoiler alert: it was indeed that simple (mostly) and yes, she was right.
Five years later, that relationship ended—largely because of my destructive behaviour, driven by insecurity, shame, resentment, and the emotional fallout of childhood trauma. I hadn’t understood any of that then. I just knew I’d hurt someone who had tried to love me, and that the problem wasn’t “women” or “relationships.” The problem was my behaviour and my unwillingness to confront my past.
2. Falling Apart to Begin Again
The months that followed were some of the darkest of my life. I’d become bitter, self-destructive, overweight, vindictive—angry at the world and angrier at myself. I cried myself to sleep more times than I can count. Sometimes quietly, more often shaking and sobbing. I felt the guilt and self-disgust in every gym session where something wobbled or every failed rep.
I knew I had to face it, I knew I had to do the work. And boy, did I. I had to unlearn who I had become in that relationship, and deal with the issues that had pushed me down that road in the first place. It was a dark time. Once a week, I’d end up hugging a bucket in my therapist’s consultation room, puking between admissions of what had happened to me as a child, the damage I had done and the damage that had been done to me. I forced myself to face everything I could and it almost killed me to do it.
And in that process, something shifted. Slowly, painfully, I went from “no marriage, no children” to “I want a wife and kids.” I told myself it meant my ex had been the problem. Looking back, that level of selfishness amazes me. I still had so much work to do.
3. The Intervention
Unfortunately, I didn’t fix everything after that breakup. I still carried toxic ideas about masculinity—thinking I needed to be “tough,” hold power, keep consequences ready. I kept a roster of women because I needed validation more than connection. I was performing manhood, not living it. Toxic, scared thinking of a man who had opened the wounds, but hadn’t removed the poison.
It got so bad that my closest friends sat me down and told me they were worried about me—worried about my worldview, my behaviour, my inability to let myself be loved. Two lines from that night have never left me:
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“You’re worthy of love the way you are. Stop trying to prove it through other people.”
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“You’re conflating sex with intimacy. That’s not who you are.”
Well, you can imagine that when your most trusted friends say these things to you, it forces you to think. It was back to therapy, back to introspective nights and a swearing off of nightlife that did such incredible things for me. I started hiking again, I spent time alone and I became a lot more selective about who I spent my time with and how. In therapy, I was learning—though I didn’t know it at the time—to be gentle, to be kind and to forgive. Not only my parents and the people in my past, but most importantly, myself. I was learning the difference between who I was at my core and the behaviours I had adopted as coping mechanisms or because I felt it was needed in today’s society. In short, I was discovering myself and what it meant to be me.
4. Amber, and the Lessons I Didn’t Want
Healing isn’t linear, and I’m stubborn. So of course, I walked right into another disaster- Amber.
Amber appeared as a plain, sweet girl who was ambitious, kind and a bit of a people-pleaser. A little rough around the edges, but nothing serious. Even my therapist approved. Until the mask slipped and the craters—not cracks—showed. And by then, it was too late and I was in too deep.
See, Amber had her own trauma and was not only a functional alcoholic, but came from a deeply enmeshed (alcoholic) family and, like her mother, showed many behaviours associated with Borderline Personality Disorder. If you know anything about BPD, your heart just dropped into your stomach, and if not, pray you never fall in love with someone who suffers from it.
The truth is, I didn’t stay because of love. I stayed because I was trying to prove—to myself and to the world—that I’d changed, that losing my first love hadn’t been in vain. Good intentions, catastrophic execution.
What followed was a year of emotional abuse, dysfunctional behaviour and truly toxic behaviour on all fronts. I wasn’t making the same mistakes, but I made a bunch of new ones that, to this day, still keep me up at night. I could say I was manipulated and abused at a time where I was at my most vulnerable—and I was—but I still made those decisions. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and at the time, I was so obsessed with starting my own family and living a clean life that I justified and rationalised truly shocking behaviour—on both sides—to try and keep that ideal alive. Obviously it failed, and I was back in therapy, unpacking a whole new set of issues and traumas. It was at this time that I realised that we never fully deal with our past and our trauma; it’s an evolving process which requires patience, kindness and understanding of self. A lesson learnt through suffering.
And if all that wasn't bad enough, the relationship had brought on panic attacks, something I had never experienced before, and to this day I still haven’t quite figured out how to avoid them completely. More work needs doing, see what I mean?
5. Becoming Soft Without Becoming Weak
Despite the damage, two things from that era reshaped me.
First, I learned to be gentle with myself. Truly gentle.
Not in a performative way—genuinely allowing myself imperfection, allowing myself to fail, allowing myself to make mistakes, allowing myself to feel without shame. I learned boundaries instead of consequences. Vulnerability instead of control. Compassion instead of self-punishment.
These lessons didn’t arrive all at once. They don’t stick permanently. They need reminding every day. But they softened me in the ways I needed to soften, without taking away my strength.
Second, something broke open in a therapy session on a grey Cape Town winter afternoon. I was crying again, gripping that same bucket, drowning in shame. And the words came out of me like a confession:
“All I want is to be a dad. All I want is to be a husband. To love and be loved, to build a life of meaning with a family of my own. I don’t know if I’ll ever have it. It kills me that I had chances and blew them. It kills me that I hurt people along the way. I don’t feel worthy of another shot, but it’s all I think about.”
When I finally stopped crying, my therapist said something that changed everything:
“This is the end point of all the hard work you’ve done. All the pain you’ve endured, all the introspection and the grief. You’ve found who you are and in doing so, realised the difference between ‘I want to have a wife and kids’ and ‘I want to be a dad and a husband.’ You’ve gone from thoughts of possession to thoughts of love, stewardship and support. It’s no longer about you for you, it’s about being your best for yourself, so you can do your best for others. Because that’s who you are, it’s what you’ve been circling this whole time.”
That discussion rewired my entire being.
6. The Sacred Masculine
From that day onward, I began living differently. Training differently. Loving differently. Working differently.
I started asking myself one question every day:
“Does this bring me closer to the man I want to be—the man who will love my wife and raise my children one day?”
If yes, I keep going.
If no, I sit with it. I listen. I correct.
For the first time in my life, I learned what it meant to love unconditionally, and it started with me—not recklessly, not without boundaries, but honestly. Because unconditional love without boundaries is self-destruction, and boundaries without love are cruelty. Now I’m not saying I’m perfect—far from it. I continue to battle my demons, continue to make mistakes, continue to feel shame, guilt and resentment. But these things no longer stop me from actively loving with grace or simply actively trying to do and be better.
I used to greyrock the world. I was kind to strangers yet terrified to love the people closest to me, because rejection would have shattered me. Now, I try to love from a place of abundance, not fear. For the first time in decades, I’m kind because I want to be the best of me for me, and the people around me. But having learnt to love unconditionally, I finally understand that it’s okay to have boundaries, reveal my shortcomings and ask to lean on others. Because part of love is trusting those around us with the parts of us that aren’t perfect, the parts we don’t like, the parts which can hurt us. And in learning that it’s okay for me to fail, I’ve learnt that it’s okay for others to do so, too. That we don’t have all the answers and we don’t have to get it right all the time. 90% of the battle is just showing up, being vulnerable and loving honestly.
We learn to stand up for ourselves without aggression.
We learn to say no without guilt.
We learn to give without bleeding ourselves dry.
We learn to be fierce, not cruel.
Gentle, not passive.
Kind, not boundaryless.
Humble, not meek.
Principled, not judgmental.
And we learn—slowly—to quiet the ego long enough to be true to ourselves.
Not always. But more and more each time.
7. What This All Means
So what’s the point of all this? I’m not entirely sure. But I keep coming back to this:
Before we have children, we must heal the child within.
Before we build a family, we must build ourselves.
We shouldn’t want kids to fill a void.
We should want a family so we can love them well.
I don’t know what it means to have a child, I don’t even know what it means to be married. I could be completely wrong about everything here. But I truly believe that we can’t go wrong by loving our internal child. By confronting our trauma and our shortcomings while still working every day to see ourselves as worthy of that love. It’s only when we do that, that we can truly love another. It’s when we go from “I want this for me” to “I want to be the best of me for the people who will mean the most to me in this world” that we truly start to become who we were meant to be. Not out of obligation, or fear or guilt, but out of love. For ourselves, and for those around us.
But I know this—when we confront our trauma with honesty and love, when we start seeing ourselves as worthy of unconditional care, something shifts. Something opens.
We stop needing love to complete us, and start wanting love and to provide love so we can give ourselves fully.
And lastly, my latest lesson has been on the importance of always showing up, even imperfectly. I made mistakes, big ones, but it never stopped me from being present and engaging. Not with performance or bravado, but with effort, honesty, vulnerability and the willingness to learn as things unfolded. I didn’t get everything right, but I didn’t disappear into silence, nor did I put myself before the partnership. I showed up for myself, for her, and for the family I want to have in the future.
And that matters. Because the point isn’t perfection; it’s alignment. It’s being able to look yourself in the mirror and know that, even with your flaws, you acted with intention and integrity- not that you were blameless. That you did what was healthy and what you believe in, rather than what was easy. You loved well. You communicated as best you could. You grew. That the relationship was your priority, not your side quest. That’s what showing up is: choosing presence over avoidance, responsibility over ego, and connection over fear. And that's all you can expect from yourself and those around you.
That’s the kind of man I want to be — for a partner, for my future family, and for myself. Not flawless. Not untouchable. Just someone who keeps leaning in, keeps choosing effort, and keeps trying to love in a way I can live with, even when pressure pushes you the other way.
8. The Closing Truth
If this journey has taught me anything, it’s that healing isn’t a single moment—it’s a practice. A daily decision to meet yourself with honesty and kindness. A willingness to show up imperfectly and try again. A commitment to becoming someone your future family can rely on, not because you’re flawless, but because you’ve learned to love with intention, boundaries, and grace.
We can’t change where we came from.
We can’t rewrite what we’ve done.
But we can choose what we do and who we become.
And if you ask me, that choice—made every day, quietly and courageously—is where real life begins.
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