Men, start talking!

“I woke up at four in the morning with a message from a friend who had committed suicide at home.

It was five hours before the weigh-in.

Ricky, this is for you."

Thus began the speech of the UFC fighter Paddy Pimblett after defeating Jordan Levitt about a month ago.

Then it went on.

"There's a stigma in this world that men can't talk about."

And when he said “this world” Pimblett was referring to the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) league, which brings together the best fighters and produces international fighting events.

However, “this world” of tough guys with communication difficulties and an inability to put anguish into words is not limited to the canvas of a ring or the demands of an extreme sport.

The world he speaks of is the most everyday, the one where we live surrounded by men with communication problems.

“Listen, if you're a man and you feel like you have a huge weight on your shoulders, and you think the only way to solve it is to kill yourself, please talk to someone.

Talk to whoever!”

Pimblett pleaded with his audience.

And when he said it like that, still sweaty and with his gloves on, shot through with the adrenaline of victory, his words gained a legitimacy impossible to achieve from another body.

Because after having subdued his opponent through the most spectacular violence, after proving himself to be the toughest and strongest guy of all, the only thing this champion needed to say is that the true strength of man, the one he needs to survive , is none other than the conquest of its fragility.

And furthermore, out of sheer intuition and perhaps also out of desperation,

“People will listen to you!

I will listen to you!

And you can cry on my shoulder, ”she urged her millionaire and mostly male audience (only on YouTube the video accumulates more than two million views).

“I will go to his funeral next week.

So please, let's remove this stigma and let men start talking," Pimblett concluded.

I had seen the fight while having dinner with my father, a regular boxing spectator and now also a UFT fan.

Otherwise I would never have attended a show difficult to catalog.

Just as boxing has a form of beauty that I manage to decipher to the extent that I understand its rules and its interiority, this league seemed to me simply the

of brutality.

You can kick, punch, elbow… And yet there we were, my father and I after the fight, facing the desperate blue eyes of the victor.

“How right you are,” he said.

So I looked at him and saw a man over seventy years old who has lived through all the stages of his life with serious difficulties for something as apparently simple as “talking about his things”.

Why is it so hard for my father to talk?

Why is it so hard for so many men?

Sometimes men are unable to speak even when they feel their own lives are in danger.

Even less when what is at stake is emotional life.

Many do not speak even if it costs them love, divorce, friendship or the understanding of a child.

Obviously, in the complex case of suicide it is impossible to establish a single cause: people from all over the world, of any age, culture, religion or gender sometimes decide to take their own life.

However, according to the WHO, men commit suicide more than women in every country in the world except for two Caribbean islands (Antigua and Barbuda and Grenada).

And according to Paddy Pimblett's intuition some cases could be prevented if men could ask for help,

If only they were able to speak.

"If you're a man, you can talk," he yells at whoever wants to listen.

And I think he is right when he explicitly addresses them: it is time for men to ask for help.

That they are explained, told, questioned and, ultimately, deny the gender roles that suffocate them.

And sometimes they kill them too.

You don't have to be at the limit to take the floor.

We are tired of attending stories (in series, books, family, love or work) with male protagonists who are abandoned (or are abandoned) due to their inability to speak.

Characters who only feel they are if they do things and if those things are socially legitimized.

In the end, that is the definition of a man in our culture: to act and get social recognition in return.

They have no words about feelings because they lack observation of their feelings.

Guys are often pure exteriority and what is worse, far from demanding a change from this insufferable role, it seems as if the macho culture in which we live urges women (and all adolescents) to understand our personal construction in this same univocal meaning.

So here we are.

Learning to live with the requirement to be empirical, practical, transparent and communicable in an unequivocal way: without nuances and if possible by videoconference.

In our culture, the intimacy of adolescents is built through a WhatsApp status or a

On Instagram.

We speak little and we do it more and more with screens and less with people.

But speech, like love, needs a body to exist.

Unfortunately, the macho culture kills the word and men are also its victims.

I also believe that many would like to talk about "their things", but they feel insecure because they feel that their words do not come from anywhere, they have not been generated in intimacy or in the contemplation of their own crises.

So what can you do?

I say we should all heed Pimblett and speak up.

Talk about our things with anyone.

Talk to the neighbor, the baker, the taxi driver, the doctor or the bus driver.

People will listen to us and that is how we will build ourselves.

We need to talk to know who we are and also to remember that, at the worst moment, we are not alone.

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