The buffalo and the storm

Out here you can watch weather come from a long way off. The sky in the west stacks up, the light goes strange and green, and everything with legs decides what to do about it. Cattle decide to leave. They feel the pressure drop, they turn their backs to it, and they walk east, away from the thing that is coming. It is a reasonable decision. It is also the wrong one, because a storm moves faster than a cow, and the storm is going east too. So the cow travels with the weather. She stays inside it for an hour instead of twenty minutes. She does everything right by her own logic and gets soaked the longest.

Buffalo do the opposite. When the front hits them they turn into it and run straight at the wall. They take the worst of it head on, at the worst possible angle, and they are through it and out the back side while the cattle are still running and still being rained on.

I have said that sentence more times than any other sentence in twenty-six years, and I keep saying it because men keep arriving having done the cow version for a decade and being genuinely confused about why they are tired.

Here is what the cow version looks like in a life. You know something is wrong. You have known for a while. So you work more, because work is a place where you are competent and nobody asks you how you are doing. You get busy in the garage. You get short with people at home and then feel bad about it and then get short about feeling bad. You drink two instead of one. You decide you will deal with it after the quarter closes, after the season ends, after the kid graduates. Every one of those choices is away from the weather, and every one of them keeps you in it longer.

Nobody does that because they are weak. They do it because running away from a storm is the obvious move. It is what the body votes for. The whole system is built to move you away from what hurts, and it is a very good system for a burning stove and a very poor one for a marriage that has gone quiet.

The thing about running at it is that it does not feel brave from the inside. It feels stupid. It feels like walking toward the exact thing you have been organizing your entire life around not having to look at. The first time a man says the true sentence out loud in a session he usually says it fast, at the end of the hour, looking at the floor, like he is getting rid of it. That is the turn. That is the buffalo. It does not look like a movie.

What does that turn actually mean in practice? It means naming the thing precisely instead of generally. Not "things have been rough." It means: I have not touched my wife in four months and I do not know how to start. It means: I think about not being here and it scares me. It means: I am angry at my son and I do not know why and I am worried about what I am doing to him. General is comfortable. Specific is the storm.

It also means staying in the conversation past the point where you want to leave it. Most arguments at home end because one person exits, and the exit can be a slammed door or it can be a shrug and a walk to the garage. Both are the same move. Both are running east. Staying in the room while the discomfort is present, at normal volume, saying the slower thing underneath the fast thing, is the version of running at the storm that you will actually be asked to do on a Tuesday.

I want to be honest about what I am and am not promising. I am not telling you that going through it is painless, or quick, or that on the other side everything is repaired. Buffalo come out of the storm wet. They come out with the storm behind them, which is different, and which is the entire point. The pain of going through is finite and it is going somewhere. The pain of running away is unlimited and it goes in circles, and it charges you interest.

The other thing I want to be clear about is that this is not a personality test. I am not saying some men are buffalo and some are cattle and you are one or the other. Everybody runs from something. The question is only ever what you do at the moment you notice you are running. That is a decision, and it is available today, and it is available again tomorrow if you miss it today.

The work I do is cognitive behavioral therapy, and this is where the metaphor meets the method. When the front hits, a thought fires before you do anything: this will make it worse, she will use this against me, I cannot handle what comes after I say it. That thought is what turns you east. So we get it out where you can see it, in words, and we check it against what actually happens rather than against what it feels like. Most of those thoughts have never been examined once. A lot of them do not survive being looked at.

You do not have to believe any of this to start. You only have to be willing to face one direction for one hour and find out what is actually in the weather. Most men discover it is smaller than the thing they have been outrunning. Not small. Smaller. And behind them for the first time in years.

Jeff Stucke, MA, LMHC. Telehealth in Indiana and Illinois.