Naked But.
This book arrived the way most true things do—not by design but by accumulation. Decades of rooms. Decades of men. Decades of questions asked in the particular quiet that follows nakedness, when the performance has stopped and something more honest has taken its place.
I didn’t set out to write it. I set out to keep the door open. The book is what happened when I finally wrote down what I’d seen on the other side.
A word about what this is and isn’t.
It isn’t therapy. Nobody is being healed of anything and I’m not qualified to heal anyone and wouldn’t try. It isn’t self-help, which would require me to believe you need help, which I don’t. It isn’t a manual or a method or a programme with steps and outcomes and a certificate at the end.
It’s an account. Honest, specific, occasionally funny, sometimes explicit in the way that honesty sometimes requires.
Written by a man who has spent sixty years being himself—not always comfortably, not always gracefully, but consistently and without much apology—and who has spent a significant portion of those years sitting with men who were still finding their way to that.
You don’t need to find yourself in every page. You don’t need to want what the men in these pages want or feel what they feel or arrive at where they arrive. Read it the way you’d listen to someone tell you something true about a world adjacent to yours. Take what’s useful. Leave what isn’t.
Or take nothing. Just read it.
It’s yours. Pass it on if you think someone else needs it.
One more thing.
The “but” in the title is the word this book is about. The hesitation. The qualifier. The thing that has been sitting between a man and himself for longer than he can remember.
Naked but ashamed. Naked but uncertain. Naked but not sure what it means. Naked but wondering what happens next.
The book doesn’t remove the but. It just sits with you while you find out whether you still need it.
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