A man-child in a jail

On Thanksgiving night of 2009, I regained consciousness in a jail cell on the island of Guam. I was 27 years old and, by most standards, a successful young man. I had a law degree, had passed the bar exam, and had begun my career working as an associate attorney.

I had checked all the boxes and jumped through all the hoops young Americans typically aspire to. I got good grades. I played sports. I had plans for the next level of education, for a career. The reality — I was a child in a man's body.

In the words of Robert Moore, author of King Warrior Magician Lover: We face a crisis in masculine identity of vast proportions. In the case of men, there are many who either had no initiation into manhood or who had pseudo-initiations that failed to evoke the needed transition into adulthood. We get the dominance of Boy Psychology.

I was never tested in the way that a boy needs to be tested before becoming a man. I was never sent into the wild. I had no vision quest. I was never initiated by men into the realm of men. And like Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, it's all good fun, but it's not the real deal.

That experience served as a wakeup call to a reality that I'd feared but refused to acknowledge — that the world did not work the way I thought and hoped it worked. Failure was an option. It might even be the appropriate, deserved outcome.

In a way, that night was initiatory. I learned something about humility, about consequences, about the stakes of this life. I learned something about what it meant to not be a man. Very soon after that night, I began growing up.