I Just Wanna Be Him
Most men think responsibility and freedom are opposites. They're not. Real freedom isn't escape. Its alignment is how you live, actually reflects what you value. Here's what it took me to learn that.
There's a popular country song out right now called "Be Her" by Ella Langley. If you haven't heard it, I'd recommend pulling it up on whatever music service you use and giving it a listen before you keep reading. It'll hit differently once you do.
The song is about a woman watching another woman live her life. Present, grounded, unencumbered. The narrator is in pain because she wants what that woman has. She wants to drink wine by the glass instead of finishing the bottle. She wants to roll over in the morning to the love of her life. She wants to say what she thinks without needing anyone to validate it. She wants to just be. And she can't get there. So she watches someone else do it, and it hurts.
I don't know about you, but I have felt that exact feeling. Maybe not about another person. But about a version of myself I could see clearly and couldn't quite get to.
What is that pain, exactly? What is the narrator actually envious of? To put it in one word: alignment. She's watching someone who is living in sync with who she actually is. No gap between the performance and the person. No version of herself for the public, and a quieter one she keeps hidden. Just one woman, fully herself, out loud.
And my question for the narrator, and honestly for myself, is this: which version is the real one? The woman you are, or the woman you believe everyone thinks you should be?
I think real freedom lives in the middle of that question. And I'll be honest. I don't want to disappoint anyone. So I played the part. The responsible one. The provider. The man who holds it together. There's nothing wrong with any of those things. Except that somewhere along the way, playing the part became the whole performance. The man underneath got quieter and quieter until I wasn't sure he was still there.
I wrote about what that cost me in detail over here. But the short version is this: I stood in front of a mirror one day and didn't recognize the man looking back. I was carrying over 265 pounds. My confidence had been built entirely on what I represented. The job, the house, the cars, the life that looked like success at a party. Not on who I actually was. Strip all of that away, and there was nothing underneath I could name. I felt like an empty shell.
That's what the performance costs. That's the bill that eventually comes due.
I have this vision of a way of being. And there's another vision of how I'm supposed to be. Freedom, real freedom, is when those two things become one. Nothing is stopping that from happening except me. I know that now. I didn't always.
Here's how most men end up this far from themselves without realizing it. From the day you're born, someone is handing you the next step. School. Career. Mortgage. Marriage. Kids. Society builds the framework, and you move through it, milestone by milestone. And for a long time, there's always a next marker, so you never have to stop and ask the question.
Then midlife arrives, and the checklist runs out. No new markers. No one is asking what's next. Just you, standing in the silence, realizing that a lot of what you've been carrying was never yours to begin with. There's a real difference between a responsibility you chose with your eyes open and one that was handed to you and carried without question. Both can be honorable. But only one is actually yours.
When you never ask that question, when duty becomes the entire definition of who you are, the obligation stops being something you carry. It starts being something that carries you. And it doesn't take you anywhere you choose to go.
Then the lie kicks in. I'll do what I want when the kids are grown. I'll take time for myself when the mortgage is paid. I'll figure out who I am when I retire. I said versions of this for years. It sounds responsible. What it actually is, and I know this now, is self-abandonment dressed up as virtue. A plan to avoid having a plan.
Because here's what happens when the kids finally leave. The man who never built a life inside his responsibilities has nothing waiting for him on the other side. He spent 25 years getting good at being gone, and now there's nowhere left to be. I came close to that myself.
The night I finally stopped waiting, I wasn't even looking for a revelation. I was taking one of my long evening walks downtown, the ones I'd started just to get out of my own head, and I stopped in front of a massive construction site. One of those sprawling downtown builds where you can't even see the top. I stood there looking at it, and a thought came from nowhere: I need to rebuild my life. Not fix it. Not salvage it. Build it. And what hit me hardest was that I had never once thought about my life as something I was building. It had always just been assembling itself around me, milestone by milestone, as long as I followed the path.
Standing on that sidewalk, I realized the path was gone. And for the first time, I was holding the blueprint.
Nobody gave me permission that night. I just stopped waiting for it.
Some men reading this are waiting for someone to tell them it's okay to live. Waiting for their wife, their kids, their boss, circumstance. Some version of the stars aligning that says: Now it's your turn. Here's what I know: nobody's coming. That permission was always yours to give.
And the longer you wait, the more that Tuesday, that ordinary Tuesday that makes up most of your actual life, just keeps passing. Empty. Waiting too.
I want to offer a different definition of freedom than the one most of us grew up with. Freedom is not the absence of obligation. I used to think it was. A man with no mortgage, no commitments, no one depending on him. That was the picture. What I've found is that's just a different kind of empty.
Real freedom is alignment. It's when how you spend your days actually reflects what you value. If you're not sure what you actually value, not what you think you should value, but what you genuinely do, I built a tool that will show you. You can find it here. Because when the life you're living looks like something you would have chosen if you'd been paying attention when you were choosing, that's alignment. A man can be deeply committed to his family, his work, his community, and still be free. The question isn't how many obligations he has. It's whether the life underneath those obligations belongs to him.
That's what alignment feels like. Light. Confident in your next step. A mind free of doubt and regret. When you don't have it, you feel the opposite. Heavy. Stuck. Like you're moving through someone else's life. That's the narrator's pain. That's what hurts so bad. Not that the other woman has more. But that she has herself. Fully. And the narrator doesn't. Not yet.
There's something else worth naming, because I've lived it. If you carry everything and never put anything down, you don't become noble. You become bitter. And bitterness leaks. It comes out sideways in short tempers and distance, a kind of checked-out presence that everyone around you feels and nobody mentions. My ex-wife told me that living with me was like walking on eggshells because she never knew when I was going to blow up. I was so far out of alignment, so buried in everything I was carrying, that I was angry and bitter and didn't even know it.
What I've come to believe is this: your kids don't need a martyr. They need a model. They're watching you right now to learn what being a man looks like. If what they see is a man who quietly gave up on himself in the name of duty, that's the lesson they carry. That love requires self-erasure. That maturity means going dead inside and calling it being responsible. A present, alive father is worth more to a kid than a martyred one who checked every box.
I know that because I've been both. Being the martyr didn't mean I wasn't there. I was there. It meant I was distracted by my own missing pieces, and my kids could feel that even when I couldn't name it.
What does a free and responsible Tuesday actually look like? For me, it starts at 4:45 am. I'm up before the rest of the world, and I love it that way. Those couple of hours are mine. I go to the gym, and I push myself as hard as I can toward my goals. Nobody needs anything from me yet. The day hasn't started pulling. That time is mine, and I protect it.
That Tuesday is available now. Not when the mortgage is paid. Not when the kids leave. Now.
I keep coming back to something Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, said: "Well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing." Ryan Holiday, who has spent his career translating these ideas for modern men, puts it this way: "You become the sum of your actions, and as you do, what flows from that, your impulses, reflect the actions you've taken. Choose wisely."
Two men. Two different centuries. The same truth. The 4:45 am isn't just a workout. It's a vote for the man you're becoming. Do it enough times, and that man shows up everywhere. Not just at the gym, but at the dinner table, in the hard conversations, in the life you're building.
Legacy isn't built by men who sacrificed everything. It's built by men who were fully alive. Men who brought something to the world, to their families, to the people around them, that came from the inside out. Not from duty alone, but from purpose.
Your 80-year-old self won’t wish you'd carried more. He's going to wish he'd shown up more fully. Present, awake, alive, for the life that was happening right in front of him.
The narrator in that song knows what alignment feels like. She can see it in someone else. She just hasn't claimed it for herself yet. Most men I know are in exactly the same place. They know. They just keep filing it away for later.
Here's the question I sit with: which version of you is the real one, and what’s actually stopping those two versions from becoming one?
What is one step you can take today to become aligned? Now take it.
I hope this post lands for you. If only to make you stop for a moment to ask yourself a question. If so, please consider subscribing to Reset and Roam. And drop a comment below. I read them all.