The lesson that arrived before language
It starts before he can read. A boy falls off a bicycle and his father says, get up. A boy cries at school and his uncle says, don't be a girl. A boy tells his mother he is scared of something and she says, don't say such things, what will people think. The correction comes so fast, and so consistently, that by the time he is twelve, he has stopped producing the feelings in a form anyone can see. He has not stopped having them. He has just learned to route them somewhere internal and airless, where they sit without names.
