Framed by Negative Space: A Man Made Out of No

by Michael Collard

This isn’t a story. It’s a question I’ve been asking since I was old enough to hate myself:
“What does it mean to be a man?” I’ve asked it a million times in a million different ways, and the answers never satisfy. They don’t feel complete. They don’t feel true. They feel like lessons I’ve been taught, not truths I’ve lived. My masculinity doesn’t feel lived in. It feels performed.

And because of that, I’ve never felt like I belonged in male spaces. From a young age, I understood masculinity as something brutal—domination, control, aggression. I didn’t learn that through lectures or cultural osmosis; I wasn’t taught it by “the woke mind virus” or “feminism.” It wasn’t women who taught me that men were dangerous, or that I was dangerous for being a man.

I learned it through experience. Through the abuse my sister and I survived. Through the way men talked, the way they moved through the world, the way they were rewarded for cruelty and punished for softness. The lesson was simple, and clear: to be a man was to hurt. To dominate. To take. To make others small in order to feel large. And because I learned that so early—and believed it so completely—I grew afraid of what it meant about my own masculinity.

I am a man. I’ve never questioned that. But I’ve also never been able to define it in a way that doesn’t feel rotten at the root. Every time I try to articulate what masculinity means to me, all I can see are the scars. All I can hear is the echo of power used to destroy. Masculinity, for me, is defined by what I don’t want to be.

My earliest understandings of male sexuality were that it was a weapon. Sharp. Penetrating. Violating. Dangerous. Not because I read it somewhere, but because it was done to me. And so I shut down. I avoided. I disassociated from my own desire—not because it wasn’t there, but because I didn’t trust it. And I still don’t.

I feel desire. I feel arousal. But I don’t interact with it directly. I keep it at arm’s length. I don’t let it breathe. Because I learned that male desire—my desire—is something that hurts other people. That the very act of wanting from me is inherently dangerous. That my body, my longing, my masculinity, are things to be monitored, caged, and policed.

I don’t shut down during intimacy because I’m afraid of being hurt. I shut down because I’m afraid that I will be the one who causes harm. That my touch will rot the moment it lands. That the simple act of being known by someone else will leave a scar on them that looks too much like the ones left on me.

I don’t think that’s noble. It doesn’t feel like strength. It feels like shame. Like failure. Like a kind of moral paralysis that’s calcified into identity. My masculinity doesn’t feel powerful—it feels like a void. Like a hole inside. I can trace its outline, but not what’s within it.

I don’t have a framework for masculinity outside of pain. Outside of control, of domination, of what was done to me and what I swore I’d never do to anyone else. I wasn’t given an alternate model. No map. No shape to grow into. Just a list of what not to become.

And that’s okay, I think. A lot of people aren’t handed frameworks. A lot of people have to build them themselves.

I used to tell myself that was noble. That restraint was wisdom. That not knowing what to build meant I was good enough not to build something broken.

But I don’t think that’s true anymore.

Because that’s not what I did.

Instead of building a scaffold to hang a new shape on—something open, something that could grow—I built walls. Gates. A vault. I didn’t try to define my masculinity. I tried to contain it. Lock it down. Keep it from leaking. I treated it like a volatile substance, something radioactive—dangerous to me, dangerous to others, safest when sealed.

And maybe that’s the problem.

Not that I lacked a model—but that I turned the absence of one into a prison. That the silence was never empty—it was filled with a tightness in my throat, a tension in my jaw, the way my body held its weight like I was bracing for a blow.  That I buried whatever version of masculinity I might have had under so many layers of caution and refusal that I’m not sure there’s anything left.

People say men need to hold other men accountable. And they’re right—we do. But they say it like it’s simple. Like men who step in will be listened to. Like masculinity grants you safe passage through dangerous spaces, as long as you wield it responsibly.

That’s not how it works.

Men who refuse the script aren’t protected by it. They’re punished for stepping outside it. I’ve been mocked. Threatened. Hit. Beaten. Had my sexuality questioned, my identity gutted, all for the sin of refusing to play the part. There’s no safety in being the “good man.” There’s just risk. And silence. And—if you’re lucky—maybe survival.

What you lose when you refuse the role isn’t just status—it’s legitimacy. Your existence is treated as suspicious. Your kindness becomes manipulation. Your restraint becomes weakness. Your softness becomes perversion. You’re not read as good—you’re read as untrustworthy, because you’ve broken the rules of how a man is supposed to behave. It’s like walking into every room with blood on your hands no one can see—but everyone smells. Even your attempts to protect others are reinterpreted as threats in disguise.

This sense of being untrustworthy, of being marked as ‘other,’ echoes the isolation I felt surviving alongside my sister. We both endured the same abuse, but carried its weight in opposite ways—she externalized, reaching out for connection, while I turned inward, folding into myself and vanishing entirely. She lived her wounds out loud. I made mine invisible. Neither of us healed. We just learned to carry it differently.

I’ve never felt safe around men. I’ve never felt like one of them. There’s something in me—something too soft, too careful, too unwilling to perform the violence—that has always marked me as other. And I think they see it. I think that’s why the judgment feels so immediate, so heavy. Like I walked into the room already guilty of something I haven’t done yet. Like there’s a tattoo on my forehead that says does not belong.

And maybe what scares me most isn’t the idea that they “became” that way. That it’s a cycle. That it’s a script. It’s not the culture I’m afraid of—it’s the core. The suspicion I’ve never been able to shake: that violence, for men, doesn’t have to be taught. That it doesn’t need to be modeled or rewarded or passed down. That it’s intrinsic. That masculinity isn’t something twisted by culture—it’s something that emerges exactly the way it was always going to.

That male sexuality is predatory not because it’s shaped that way, but because that’s what it is. That being a man means being dangerous by design. That no matter how careful I am, no matter how many layers I wrap around it, the damage is already written in. Maybe it was never about resisting a pattern. Maybe it was never about surviving an environment.

Maybe it’s just this: I was born with something poisonous inside me, and it’s only a matter of time. That it’s not just my sexuality I have to be afraid of—it’s my genetic inheritance. That I’m tainted, corrupted, damned even—not by what was done to me, but by what I am.

Even as a child, I couldn’t access the version of masculinity they tried to sell me. The power fantasy we’re all handed young: the muscle-bound defenders of justice, the strong, invulnerable men who always win, always dominate.

He-Man—so masculine you have to say it twice.

The Hulk, pure rage-as-strength.

Even Spider-Man—who leaned on wit and agility instead of bulk—still fought. Still dominated. Still won through power, just in a different domain.

A script that taught little boys: if you can’t dominate with strength, do it with charm, or guilt, or wit. But never stop.

Domination isn’t just masculinity—it’s success.

But me? I didn’t want to conquer. I didn’t even want to win. I just wanted to not be hurt.

That’s why my favorite was always Cain Marko—the Juggernaut. Professor Charles Xavier’s stepbrother, for those less comic-book fluent. He had strength, sure—sometimes even enough to rival the Hulk. But that wasn’t what defined him.

What defined him was that you couldn’t stop him. You couldn’t hurt him. Once he got moving, he was invulnerable. Untouchable. He did what he wanted, when he wanted—but mostly? He just hung out with his friends. Sat at bars. Kept to himself.

That was the fantasy that made sense to me. Not domination. Not heroism. Immunity. I didn’t want to be feared. I just wanted to be unwoundable. And the only way I knew to get close to that was to build walls so thick no one could get in—because when people got in, they broke things. So, like the Juggernaut, I became untouchable, but I didn’t see what it’d cost me.

Being invulnerable doesn’t just keep harm out. It keeps everything out. You don’t get to pick and choose. Safety isn’t a scalpel—it’s a sealed vault. And inside that vault, you don’t just lose fear. You lose intimacy. You lose connection. You lose the parts of yourself that need to be seen to stay alive. The dream of never being hurt curdles slowly into a life of never being touched. And that kind of silence feels holy—until you realize it’s also a kind of death.

I’m not sure what masculinity is supposed to look like when you strip away the trauma. I don’t know what it means to be a man who isn’t defined by either dominance or refusal. I’m not sure I’ve ever really been in my masculinity—only adjacent to it. I’ve spent so long building fences around the things

I was afraid of becoming that I don’t even know if there’s anything left behind them. Just quiet. Just tension. Just vigilance.

I want to believe that there’s a version of masculinity that isn’t built on harm. I want to believe that I can exist as a sexual being without fear. I want to believe that I can be touched without bracing for impact. That I can want without wounding. That I can be a man without being a monster. But every time I reach for that hope, my fear pulls me back.

Wanting something doesn’t make it true, no matter how desperately I wish it could.

And believing something is possible doesn’t mean I’ll ever get there.

But even in those moments—when I’m bracing, when I’m pulling away—I still want to believe it’s not inevitable.

Because here’s the thing: at the end of the day, I know—intellectually—that masculinity isn’t danger.

That sexuality isn’t violation. That being a man doesn’t mean I’m destined to hurt people.

But it’s the difference between knowing and internalizing. Between what I understand in theory, and what I feel in my body. Because my masculinity isn’t something I live inside with comfort or pride—it’s something I monitor. Something I restrict. Something I built entirely in opposition to the thing I fear becoming.

My masculinity is framed by negative space.

And at the center of that space, at the foundation of who I am, there’s a vow I made to myself as a child. A six-word mantra I repeated over and over in the quiet moments when I could think, could contextualize, could try to make sense of what was happening to me:

"I will never be like him."

That was it. That simple, that direct. But it was overpowering. That sentence became the axis of my entire being. Not a declaration of identity, but a perimeter. A moral fence line. I didn’t know how to be a man—I just knew what kind of man I’d never be. And so everything I did, every relationship I formed, every silence I held, every refusal I made—all of it was shaped by that one sentence.

That vow governed everything. Who I let in. Who I pushed away. What I let myself want. What I didn’t. I measured every impulse against it, filtered every instinct through it, weaponized it against my own longing—just to keep myself clean. Just to stay on the right side of that line. And maybe, over time, I stopped believing I deserved anything on the other side of it. Maybe that’s what the vow cost me: not just who I could’ve become, but what I believed I was allowed to feel.

But what no one tells you is this: when your entire self is built around a refusal, you are still—on some level—orbiting the thing you swore to never become. It defines you, even as you push it away. And over time, a quieter question begins to form:
Was it the vow that kept me from becoming him? Or was I never like him to begin with?

And then a darker one:
What if the only thing that ever kept me from becoming him was the clench in my stomach every time I touched someone gently?

I don’t know what happens if I let go of it.
If I stop repeating the words—even silently, even for a breath—does the spell break? Does the protection vanish? Do I find out I was right all along?

That it wasn’t just fear.
That I was dangerous.
That the harm lived in me, quietly, all along.
And all I ever did was hold it back.

I don’t have answers.
I only have the silence I built to stay safe.
The rituals. The restraint.
The patterns I mistook for proof.

And sometimes, I look in the mirror and feel nothing at all.
Not guilt. Not rage.
Just the hollow space where certainty should live.
And the echo of a sentence I still whisper, even now:
I will never be like him.

Not because I believe it.
Not because I don’t.
But because I don’t know what’s left if I stop.

BIO: Sean Collard is a self-taught writer whose work examines trauma, memory, and the moral complexity of survival. His essay “The Risk of Forgetting Why” is forthcoming in CRAFT Literary (August 2025). He lives and writes in Springfield, Missouri.