Most men I know are living double lives.
Not in a dramatic sense. No secrets, no second family, no fraud. Just the quiet, endless distance between who they are and what they know they can be. Between how they look and how they want to look. The person they present to the world and the person they meet when they are alone and the noise is off.
that gap That’s what I’m saying.
It is not obvious from the outside. Men get better at carrying it. They are busy. They manage the gap instead of closing it. They are competent, efficient, even successful. And yet, somewhere underneath it all, they know.
I started running on 12th July 2025. Not because I wanted to. I hate running. I started because I needed something harder than an excuse.
The idea was simple. Run daily for a year. One kilometer for every man lost to suicide each year in the UK. 4,392 of them. I finish on 12th July 2026.
I never guessed what would happen if I returned one thing.
The first few weeks were physical. Just walking out the door, logging miles, going home. But somewhere around week six, something shifted. When you remove the stop option, you stop talking to yourself. And when you stop talking to yourself, you start to see things more clearly.
I saw the gap.
Not the first time. But apparently, probably for the first time.
Most men face the same gap. A moment when they promised themselves something and didn’t deliver. A relationship has deteriorated because they shut down the conversation. A version of themselves they flash once and then slowly speak to themselves. A sudden awareness of a child watching them, and what they are modeling.
The gap does not announce itself. It accumulates.
And men, on the whole, don’t talk about it. Not because they are incapable of self-reflection. Because they don’t have the language for it, or the space for it, or the belief that anyone around them wants to hear it. So they manage it. They drink around it, work around it, joke around it, scroll around it. They are in motion so that they cannot feel how they are inside.
That’s it. That’s the whole problem.
I work with the boys at school through the foundry. Twelve to sixteen years old, mostly. We talk about who they are and who they want to be. What they are afraid of. What they are proud of. What do they think it means to be a man?
Those who struggle the most are not the ones with the biggest problems. They are the ones who have already learned to manage the gap instead of closing it. Boys who have already built walls around the distance between who they are and who they can be. Boys who learn early that showing gaps is dangerous.
They learned it from somewhere.
I am not arguing that men suffer uniquely. But I’m saying the gap is real, it costs men and those around them, and the way we currently help men deal with it isn’t working.
We either ignore it or we pathologize it. We call men man up, or say masculinity is the problem. None of this closes the gap. Neither of them look honest.
Running didn’t close my gap. Not quite. But it gave me something more useful. It proved to me that I can do things I don’t want to do, consistently, over time, when no one is watching. It gave me proof against my own excuses.
The gap narrows when you start acting like the person you want to be before you feel like him.
No one told me that stuff. You don’t think it your way. You work your way through it.
I will finish on July 12th. Day 366.
There will be a finish line, a few people, and then there will be a gap, a little smaller than that, waiting for what comes next.
ok That’s the job.
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