Posted on January 17, 2026

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One of the hardest parts of my recovery has not been PTSD, fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder, or even surviving a ruptured brain aneurysm. Those things are visible enough. They can be named, diagnosed, measured, medicated, explained.

The real fight has been with masculinity. Not in the abstract, but in my own life, my own body, and my own sense of self.

That fight came in two parts.

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Waking Up in the Future

After my aneurysm rupture, I regained consciousness with significant memory loss. Doctors, nurses, and family kept telling me I was fifty years old. In my head, I was still in my mid thirties.

I had not aged into this stage of life. I had arrived in it without warning or preparation.

It felt less like recovery and more like waking up in the future.

If someone had asked me in my thirties whether I would like to time travel fifteen years forward, I would probably have said yes. You expect things to improve. You assume progress. Instead, I woke into a reality that felt unfamiliar and hostile. Not only was my body broken, but the cultural landscape had shifted in ways I did not recognise or understand.

Masculinity, which had always been a given in my world, suddenly felt suspect. Something to be apologised for. Something to be explained or softened. I was not eased into this change. I collided with it at my most vulnerable point.

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Loss of Function, Loss of Identity

The second part of the fight was more personal.

I had gone from being an able-bodied infantry soldier, a private military contractor, a close protection officer, to being disabled and dependent. I could not work out what I loathed more, the wheelchair or the man I feared it had made me.

That may sound harsh, but honesty matters more than comfort.

After regaining consciousness at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, I shut down. I barely spoke. When I did, it was only when necessary. This was not depression or sulking. It was caution.

Speech carries risk when you do not understand the rules of the environment you are in.

I observed. I listened. I tried to understand this strange new reality without exposing myself to unnecessary mistakes. At the same time, I felt exposed and vulnerable in a way I never had before.

Then there was fear.

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Fear Without Armour

Fear and I had never really been acquainted. I knew what it was, but it had no place in my former life. I had been trained and conditioned to override fear through repetition, discipline, and action. Fear was something you registered and moved past.

After neurological injury, that system no longer worked.

Fear did not convert into action. It simply existed. Raw and unfiltered.

That hit hard.

Being frightened without an immediate way to override it feels like betrayal by your own mind. It forces you to confront a version of yourself you have never had to know. I was dealing with this while also trying to understand a cultural attitude to masculinity that felt completely disconnected from my lived experience.

Even after being transferred to the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, and later to a neurological rehabilitation centre, I spent long periods alone in my room. I knew I could not live like that forever, but at the time I did not want to talk about how I was feeling or the confusion I was experiencing.

Instead, my mind went backwards.

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Returning to First Principles

I returned to childhood memories.

My father was a strong man, much older than the fathers of most boys my age by around fifteen years. He was ex-military. Honour, respect, discipline, self-discipline. These were not slogans. They were expectations.

As a child, I never felt safer than when I was with him. That is not sentimentality. It is fact.

I remembered growing up in our villa in Saudi Arabia. I remembered conversations while fishing, especially the time we spent together in Oman. That was my last Christmas with him before I returned to the UK to join the army.

A teenage boy and an older man on a sandy beach beside a Land Rover, preparing fishing gear under a bright sky.

My father set high standards. He taught me everything. He was more than a father. He was my best friend.

In rehabilitation, I replayed those memories repeatedly. Lessons taught by my father and my grandfather. Lessons reinforced later in the army. I refused to believe that everything I had been taught about being a man was suddenly wrong or obsolete.

These were lessons taught by good men. Men of honour. Men who lived by a code. Men who took responsibility when it mattered and owned their mistakes.

I looked at men through history, not as caricatures but as men who carried responsibility under pressure. The conclusion was unavoidable.

The problem was not masculinity itself.

The problem was its misrepresentation.

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Refusing Erasure

Somewhere along the line, ideological narratives had begun to matter more than reality.

Masculinity is not toxic. It is not inherently dangerous. It is not outdated. It is not a social construct that can be rewritten at will.

Masculinity is part of me. Biological, psychological, inherited. Embedded in my DNA, my upbringing, and my lived experience.

At that point, I made a conscious decision. I was done being silent. Done hiding. Done outsourcing my identity to people who had never carried responsibility or risk.

I chose to trust myself. My core beliefs. What I had been taught.

Once I did that, things changed.

Fear no longer dominated me. People stopped treating me like a victim because I stopped organising myself as one. I set goals. I built routines. I challenged myself.

I discharged myself from the rehabilitation centre. The staff were kind, but it was a soft environment. I needed responsibility. I needed ownership.

Not just for my own sake, but for my family’s.

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Responsibility Over Comfort

I had no intention of becoming a burden on my wife. I also needed to set an example for my children. Not bravado. Not denial. But how to face hardship with dignity, humour, resilience, self-respect, and compassion.

Compassion matters. For others and for yourself.

My reality has changed. I know I can no longer override fear with training in the way I once did. That is fine. Fear only has power if you grant it authority. I have learned to sit with it and replace suppression with communication.

That is a better tool for the reality I now live in.

I am no longer a soldier. I will never again operate as a private military contractor or close protection officer. That is fine too. Those were careers. Functions.

They were never my identity.

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A New Role, Old Values

I am carving out a new role based on the values I was taught by my father, my grandfather, and reinforced by military service. My aim now is to help others through lived experience.

That is why I write about masculinity.

Young boys like my son need clear guidance on how to be good men. They need clarity, not confusion. They need to understand masculinity and how and when to apply it. Strength without judgement is useless. Restraint without courage is hollow.

Young girls like my daughters need good male role models. They need to know what traits to look for in good men. Stability. Accountability. Integrity. Compassion backed by strength.

This is not nostalgia. It is responsibility.

Masculinity is not validated by cultural approval. It is validated by conduct. By how a man behaves when life strips him of status, strength, and certainty.

Masculinity does not disappear when the body fails. It adapts. It matures. It expresses itself through ownership rather than dominance, consistency rather than force.

I no longer define myself by physical capability. I define myself by how I respond to reality. How I treat my family. How I carry responsibility without self-pity.

This version of masculinity is not fashionable. It will not trend. It will not be applauded by institutions that prefer comfort to truth.

But it works.

It gives meaning. It restores agency. It provides a framework strong enough to hold fear, pain, and loss without collapsing into bitterness or erasure.

I did not recover by denying injury. I recovered by reclaiming authorship.

Masculinity did not need to be abandoned.

It needed to be remembered, applied with judgement, and lived with integrity.

That is the work I am committed to now.

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Why I Write, and Who This Is For

I am not writing to win arguments or chase approval. I write because too many men are navigating identity and responsibility in silence, unsure which parts of themselves they are allowed to keep.

If you feel disoriented by cultural noise but grounded in lived experience, you are not alone.

If you have lost physical capability, career, or certainty and wonder what remains, this conversation is for you.

If you are a father raising sons and daughters in a confused world, these questions are not theoretical.

I am not offering slogans or shortcuts. I am offering honesty drawn from experience, failure, adaptation, and responsibility.

If any of this resonates, stay with the work. Read. Reflect. Disagree if you must, but do so seriously. Talk to your sons. Be visible to your daughters. Hold yourself to standards that do not depend on applause.

Masculinity does not need defending with anger, nor dissolving through apology.

It needs to be lived.