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.

Symptoms of boy psychology include violence, acting out, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and weakness. A man operating with Boy Psychology lacks the ability “to act effectively and creatively in one’s own life and to engender life and creativity in others”.

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.

The only rites or rituals involving passage or initiation were matters of boys initiating boys. And like Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, it’s all good fun, but it’s not the real deal.

Boys initiating boys leads to men who’ve failed to embrace the stakes of manhood. The guy in that Guamanian jail knew very little about consequences. As far as he was concerned, he was the center of the universe, the star of the movie, and in the end, he’d always prevail. That experience served as a wakeup call to a reality that he’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.

That man-child practitioner of Boy Psychology stepped out of that jail early on a Friday morning, needing to get back to the apartment and have a shower in time to get to work. He had crossed a threshold from the bulletproof world of his prolonged state of adolescence and into the big, mean world that would not grant him his way and might very well chew him up and spit him out.

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. I learned that something fundamental needed to change, a shift I now understand as the transition from Boy Psychology to Man Psychology.

It was a turning point toward mature masculinity.

Very soon after that night, I began growing up. .