BLEEDING OR SHITTING
What unmanaged men do to the people who love them
There’s something that happens in a man’s body before he knows it’s happening.
A conversation goes sideways. A tone lands wrong. A silence stretches one beat too long. And somewhere between his chest and his mouth, something old gets activated, something he has probably carried since before he had words for it, and it moves. Not toward him. Outward. Toward whoever is standing closest.
He didn’t plan it. He might not even notice it happened. But the person across from him felt it. They always do.
This is not a piece about bad men. It is a piece about unmanaged ones.
Two kinds of damage
When a man has some awareness of his emotional wounds but is not actively working on them, he bleeds. The bleeding is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks like withdrawal at the moment someone needs him most. Sometimes it looks like a sharp word that came from somewhere else entirely. Sometimes it looks like a pattern of behavior he can almost explain, if you ask him on a good day, in the right light, with enough time to think about it.
He knows something is wrong. He doesn’t know what to do about it yet. And so it leaks, mostly onto the people he is closest to, because proximity is where pressure finds its outlet.
The man who has no idea why he does what he does, who has not begun to ask the questions, who moves through his relationships like a force of nature he himself doesn’t understand, that man doesn’t bleed.
He shits.
The distinction matters. Not because one is forgivable and the other isn’t. Both cause damage. Both leave a mess that the other person has to clean up. But the man who is bleeding is at least in proximity to the wound. There is something to work with there. The man who is shitting doesn’t know there’s a wound. He thinks this is just how relationships go. He thinks other people are the problem. He thinks the pattern will resolve itself if he can just find the right partner, the right circumstance, the right version of his life where none of this comes up.
It doesn’t resolve. It repeats.
A few questions worth sitting with
Do you know what your triggers are? Not in the abstract. Specifically. The situation, the tone, the word, the silence that takes you somewhere you didn’t choose to go.
When you go there, do you know where you are going?
When you came back, did you look at what you left behind?
Has the same argument happened more than twice? With more than one person?
When someone who loves you tells you that something you did hurt them, what is your first move, honestly, not the move you’re proud of, the first one?
This is not about being the perfect man
It is about being honest.
There is a version of this work that gets dressed up as self-improvement, as optimization, as becoming a better leader or a more effective communicator. That framing is fine if it gets you in the door. But what we are actually talking about is accountability at the level of the body. Your history lives in you. Your unprocessed losses, your early attachments, your moments of shame that never got named, they do not evaporate. They wait. And they find expression in the relationships that feel safest to them, which are, unfortunately, the relationships that matter most to you.
This is true for women. For anyone who has ever been close to another person and left something behind they didn’t intend to leave. But this publication speaks in a particular voice, to a particular reader, and so, men, this one is yours.
The least harmful option is not the noble one.
There is a man who, knowing what he is carrying and knowing he has not yet done the work to carry it safely, removes himself from a relationship before he bleeds or shits on someone he cares about. People talk about that move like it’s noble. It is, at minimum, less harmful. But let’s be honest about what it also is: it is still avoidance. It is still a man choosing distance over the vulnerability of saying, I am not okay, and I need help getting there.
The actual work, the harder version, looks like finding a safe container, a therapist, a men’s group, a space that was built to hold this, and bringing the wound there instead of to the person you’re in a relationship with. Not because your partner can’t know you’re struggling. They should. But the distinction between being known in your struggle and bleeding or shitting your struggle onto someone else, that distinction is the entire ballgame. That space, when it exists between two people, has to be built together. It cannot be assumed. It cannot be taken.
The man who is doing the work knows the difference.
What containment actually means
Containment is not suppression. It is not the stoic performance of being fine when you are not. It is not white-knuckling your way through a conversation so you don’t say the thing.
Containment is the result of doing enough of your own work that your pain has somewhere to go that isn’t the people you love. It is a practice, not a destination. It requires honesty, usually with someone trained to receive it, and consistency, the kind that doesn’t show up only in crisis.
Most men were never taught that this was an option. They were taught to manage, to push through, not to need. And so they bleed or shit, often for decades, and wonder why the same wound keeps reopening in different relationships, with different people, in different cities, like the common denominator couldn’t possibly be them.
It is them. It is also not their fault that no one told them sooner.
Both of those things are true.
Claude Lemieux wore 22 for the Colorado Avalanche. Four Stanley Cups. Nearly 1,500 NHL games. One of the most ferociously competitive men to ever play the sport, the kind of player who made you feel something every time he was on the ice, whether you loved him or wanted to fight him.
Days before he died, he carried a torch into an arena. In public. In front of everyone.
He died by suicide on May 28th, 2026. He was 60 years old.
His family is donating his brain to Boston University’s CTE Center. In their statement, they said they hope his name, connected to this research, will lead to more honest conversations and better protection for the people who come after him.
More honest conversations.
That’s what this is. That’s what this has always been.
I don’t know what he was carrying. I don’t know if it was unprocessed pain or a brain that had absorbed too many hits or something else entirely that none of us will ever name accurately. His family asked that no conclusions be drawn, and I won’t.
What I know is this: uncontained pain doesn’t stay inside. It moves. It finds the people closest to it. And when a man has no safe place to bring it, no container, no practice, no honest reckoning with what he is carrying, it goes somewhere. Sometimes it bleeds on the people he loves. Sometimes it shits on them. And sometimes, in its darkest form, it leaves them entirely.
That number on the back of a jersey meant something to a kid in a lacrosse helmet who didn’t know yet what it would cost to be principled, only that he wanted to be. I wore 22. He wore 22.
Do the work. Find the container. Have the honest conversation with someone trained to receive it, before it finds somewhere else to go.
If you are bleeding, find the wound.
If you are shitting, start asking why.
If you don’t know which one you’re doing, that’s your answer.
No quarter.
That’s not just the name of this publication. It’s the terms. No retreat from the hard thing. No negotiation with the comfortable lie. It costs something to be principled, and this work is going to ask you to pay it.
Starting now, I’ll be reading some of this work aloud. Short episodes, five to ten minutes. Story time for men who don’t have time to read, but can’t stop thinking. You can find it wherever you listen. Pull it up on a drive. Put it on in the gym. Let it sit with you.
This one’s first.
No quarter given.