Intimacy, Food and Gillette

There are two things that, throughout history, have always defined the fragile edge of man: what he eats, and who he shares his body with.

Both are needs. Both are rituals. Both, taken to excess or denied entirely, reveal something about character that words alone never do.

I have never believed that willpower is proven by what a man consumes — but by what he chooses to do without, and why. The reason matters more than the restriction itself.

For me, the answer has always come back to the same place: Gillette. My mother, in every sense that word can carry. What I’ve given up, over the years, was never given up for admiration. It was given up because something else mattered more in that moment — the work, the writing, the site, the story that needed telling.

The body follows the mind. It always has. But the mind, too, needs someone watching over it — and I’ve learned, slowly, that doing everything alone is not always the same as doing it well.

So today I write less about denial, and more about direction. What matters is not how much a man gives up, but what he is walking toward when he does.