A lot of men arrive at this work late, sideways, and slightly embarrassed. Usually after something breaks: a marriage, a job, a body, a patience that had held for twenty years. The lateness is not a personal failing. It is what happens when half the emotional vocabulary is trained out of you before you are twelve.
What got sent down, and when
Most boys learn a short list very early: do not cry, do not need, do not be afraid, do not want too obviously. The learning is rarely a single moment. It is a thousand small corrections, most of them from people who meant well and were passing on what had been done to them.
What gets buried is not weakness. It is usually tenderness, uncertainty, grief, and the ordinary wish to be looked after. Buried does not mean gone. It means unavailable to you and perfectly visible to everyone who lives with you.
Nothing was missing. It was sent below, early, by a boy who was told it would cost him.
How it shows up at forty
It shows up as a narrow band. Fine most of the time, and then anger, which is the one channel left open. It shows up as not knowing what you want, because wanting was the first thing to go quiet. It shows up as being told you are distant by someone who is not wrong, and having no idea what they mean, because from the inside it feels like being calm.
And it shows up in the body first: the jaw, the chest, the sleep.
Why the page rather than the conversation
Writing has an advantage for anyone who was trained out of speaking about this. Nobody is watching, nothing has to be performed, and there is no one to reassure while you work out what you actually think. You can be inarticulate on paper. That is not possible out loud, and being inarticulate is the necessary first stage.
It is also the reason the work goes better with a structure than with a blank book. A blank book asks a man who was taught not to introspect to invent both the question and the answer. A sequence of questions asks him only for the answer, which is difficult enough.
Forty days is not a long time
It is one page a day for six weeks. It is less time than most men spend deciding what to watch. The reason it works is not intensity, it is repetition: the same territory approached forty times, until the parts that have not been spoken to in thirty years finally believe someone is actually listening.