The Monsters in the Closet.

The darkness in the world is real but so are the good men fighting it. This one's for our daughters.

I almost didn’t write this.

I sat with it for days. Something got into me that I couldn’t shake — and I didn’t know what to do with it except eventually put it on the page.

But before I get into that, let me tell you about bedtime at my place.

Every night, it’s the same ritual.

Hugs. Storytime. And then the part I’ve come to love most — the quiet few minutes where my girls tell me about their day. The thing that’s sitting on them. The thing they’ve been carrying around since third period that they haven’t said out loud yet.

Sometimes it’s small. A friend who said something weird at lunch. A test they’re not sure about.

Sometimes it’s the real hard-hitting stuff.

“Dad. PB&J again? Really?”

I know. I know. The audacity. The absolute culinary betrayal of a father who loves his daughters and also has exactly four functional meals in his rotation. I’ve been workshopping the lunch situation. I’m aware.

But they eat it — every time. So I’m counting that as a win and moving on.

Sometimes what surfaces is bigger. Something they’re dreading about tomorrow. A fear they can’t quite name but feel in their chest when the lights go out.

And every night, I listen.

I don’t fix it. I don’t minimize it. I don’t tell them it’s going to be fine before they’ve even finished the sentence.

I just let it land.

Because somewhere along the road of my own demolition and rebuilding, I learned something I wished someone had taught me a long time ago.

The thing you don’t name owns you.

When my girls were little — we’re talking barely walking, still figuring out the whole gravity thing — they’d sometimes wake up convinced there was something in the closet.

You know the drill. Every parent does.

You pad down the hall at 2 am. You open the door. You make a show of it. You say, see, nothing there. They relax. You go back to bed and lie there staring at the ceiling, wondering how you’re going to function tomorrow on four hours of sleep.

The monster in the closet is a rite of passage.

And here’s the thing we tell kids — and mean it, because it’s true:

There’s nothing in there.

But here’s the thing nobody tells them about the monsters that actually exist.

They don’t hide in closets.

Then I read something that stopped me cold.

A CNN investigation. I’m not going to detail it here because, honestly, it’s heavy. The kind of thing you read and then put your phone down and just sit with for a while. Wishing you never read it because you can’t unsee the images in your brain.

What I’ll say is this: it was about men. Organized, deliberate, community-reinforced predation against women. Against wives. Against the people they were supposed to love and protect.

My first reaction was disbelief.

Wait. What?

I read it again.

What in the actual fuck.

And disbelief became something darker. Something hotter.

Because it wasn’t just the act — it was the casual justifications threaded through it. The minimizing that men use to talk themselves out of accountability and into permission.

I was angry. The kind that doesn’t have anywhere to go, that sits in your body and burns.

And then I hit the detail that really sent me over the edge.

A psychologist who assessed the men convicted in a high-profile European rape trial used a specific word to describe how these men operated together.

How they encouraged each other and normalized what they were doing through collective participation.

She called it brotherhood.

Brotherhood?!

I had to read that twice.

Because that’s my word. The word I use when I talk about what men need most to heal. To grow. To hold each other accountable. To stop lying to themselves. Brotherhood is the thing that pulls a man back from the edge — the honest kind, where other men refuse to let you stay broken.

And here it is flipped completely inside out.

Brotherhood is the thing that scales evil instead of interrupting it.

Men finding community. Bonds. Camaraderie. Around this.

That’s not just dark. That’s a desecration of something I believe in deeply. And it made me furious in a way that’s hard to articulate without just saying — what the actual fuck is wrong with people.

And underneath all of it — underneath the outrage and the grief about brotherhood being desecrated — there was something older than all of that.

Something primal.

I have daughters.

And I don’t know how to fully protect them from this.

Not completely. Not in the way every cell in my body is screaming at me to.

That helplessness — that’s the thing that really cracked me open. Because a man can do a lot of things. He can work hard, show up, build something, fix something. But he can’t put himself between his daughters and every broken man in the world.

And that feeling — that raw, animal, what-the-fuck-do-I-do-with-this feeling — that’s what sent me to the page.

Then came the number.

The viral posts. The outrage threads. The debates about how many men were actually involved. The news cycle doing what the news cycle does — packaging it, amplifying it, turning a moral catastrophe into a statistic to argue about on the internet.

And I had to stop myself.

Because debating the number is itself insane.

It’s what we do to make something survivable to think about. We quantify it. We fact-check it. We turn it into a data point so we can hold it at arm’s length instead of sitting with what it actually means.

But the number doesn’t matter.

One man doing this is one too many. The fact that it exists at all — that there are communities, tutorials, organized networks built around this — that’s the thing that should be breaking all of us. Not the number. The existence.

And then I watched what happened next.

The outrage. The debate threads. The hot takes, quote tweets, and think pieces. The news cycle churning it, packaging it, feeding it into the dopamine machine.

And then — within days — something else came along. And people scrolled on.

That scared me more than the original story.

We live in a fast food culture now. Outrage in, outrage out. Our dopamine-soaked brains have been trained by the algorithm to process the horror, perform the reaction, refresh the feed.

I sat there wondering — is this just a momentary spike? Does this get forgotten by next week? Do we scroll past it and go back to our lives?

And if we do — what does that say about us?

What does that say about the world my daughters are growing up in — where even the things that should permanently change how we see each other get a 48-hour news cycle and then disappear?

That kept me up more than the report itself.

And I didn’t have to look far for the bigger picture — the Epstein files, the systems built to protect certain men, the entitlement dressed up as tradition. Look around. It’s not subtle anymore.

I had to put my phone down.

And then I just sat there with my own anger for a while.

Which is when something uncomfortable happened.

I recognized it.

Not the predation — I want to be clear about that. But the anger itself. The way it was moving through me. Hot. Directionless. Looking for somewhere to land.

I’ve written about what happens to men when darkness goes underground. When shame and disconnection and rage have nowhere to go. When a man has no tools, no language, no container for what he’s feeling — and it all just festers until it comes out sideways.

Sitting there with my phone face down on the table, I could feel a version of that happening in real time. Inside me.

The anger was valid. It still is. But I know what unchecked anger does to a man. I’ve watched it. I’ve lived a version of it. It disconnects you. From yourself, from the people you love, from any ability to think clearly or act with integrity. It pulls you toward the toilet and if you’re not paying attention — down you go.

So I had to do the thing.

I had to lean on the stuff I learned the hard way. The tools I picked up in the rooms, the men’s work, in the pages of my own journal at 11pm when nobody was watching.

Breathe. Name it. Feel it without becoming it.

I’m angry because I believe in men. And this is what happens when men lose their way without anyone to pull them back.

I’m angry because I have daughters. And the world they’re growing into is more complicated than I want it to be.

I’m angry because brotherhood means something to me. And watching it get twisted into something grotesque — that’s a specific kind of grief.

Named it. Felt it. Let it move through instead of taking up permanent residence.

And on the other side of that — not fixed, not resolved, but clear enough to write — I came back to the thing I actually know to be true.

Because here’s the other thing I know.

I know good men. A lot of them. Men doing the quiet, unglamorous work of showing up — for their kids, their partners, their communities, themselves. Men in the rooms I’ve sat in, doing the hard interior work with zero audience and zero applause.

Men who will never make the news. Who will never trend. Who will never get a 48-hour outrage cycle written about them.

Because they’re just out there being decent. Doing the work. Showing up.

Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash

Those men outnumber the darkness.

I have to believe that.

I do believe that.

And I know something else.

The way we fight the darkness isn’t by drowning in it. It isn’t by letting the outrage cycle eat us alive. It isn’t by becoming so afraid of what men can do that we stop believing in what men can be.

It’s by raising daughters and sons who can see clearly.

And that’s the part I can actually do something about.

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Because I write about men. I think about men. I try to understand how we get lost and how we find our way back.

And here’s what I keep coming back to.

Nobody taught those men the bedtime ritual.

Nobody sat with them in the dark when they were nine, or twelve, or sixteen, and said — what are you afraid of? What are you carrying? What don’t you want to face tomorrow?

Nobody built that space for them.

So the fear went underground. The shame went underground. The loneliness, the rejection, the desperate need for connection they didn’t have language for — all of it went underground.

And underground is where things rot.

Underground is where a man stops asking and starts scheming. Where he stops feeling and starts controlling. Where the thing he can’t name slowly owns him completely.

The monster wasn’t in the closet. It grew in the silence.

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So what do I teach my daughters?

Not fear.

Fear makes you freeze. Fear makes you second-guess your own instincts. Fear is what the closet monster wants.

What I want to give them is something harder to build and more durable than fear.

Clarity.

The ability to look straight at something — a situation, a person, a feeling in their gut that something is off — and trust what they see.

To know that their instincts are data. That discomfort is information. That when something feels wrong, it gets named out loud, not swallowed politely because someone might be uncomfortable.

I want them to know that real strength isn’t the absence of fear.

It’s the ability to open the closet door anyway.

To stand in the doorway, let their eyes adjust to the dark, and see the thing for what it actually is.

Not a monster.

Just a shadow.

And shadows don’t survive the light.

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Every night I check in.

Every night I build the container a little bigger.

Every night I’m teaching them — without ever using these words — that the thing you’re afraid of gets smaller when you say it out loud. That someone will stay in the room with you while you look at it. That you don’t have to carry it alone into sleep.

I’m not naive enough to think bedtime conversations are armor against everything the world will throw at them.

But I know this:

The girls who learn to name their fear grow into women who trust themselves. And women who trust themselves are a hell of a lot harder to manipulate, gaslight, or override.

That’s not a guarantee.

But it’s the best thing I’ve got.

So every night — hugs, storytime, and the quiet space where the real stuff surfaces.

Even if that real stuff is a formal complaint about the sandwich situation.

We check the closet together.

And then we leave the light on just enough.

If you’re a good man — and I believe most of you are — this is your moment.

Not to shame. Not to guilt. Not to beat your chest about how you’re one of the good ones.

Just to hold the line.

On integrity. On honesty. On showing up for the people in your life with your whole self instead of your defended self.

The darkness doesn’t win because evil men are loud. It wins because good men go quiet.

Don’t go quiet.

Call another man forward. Hold the standard in your own life. Build the kind of brotherhood that pulls men back from the edge instead of pushing them over it.

That’s it. That’s the whole ask.

Hold the line.

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The monsters aren’t in there, baby.

But they exist.

And you’re going to be okay anyway.

Because I’m going to teach you to see them coming.

You’ll have X-ray vision.