Between shit and response there is a space. What you do there determines the man you will be.

When most of us hear the word responsibility, we think of the traditional roles men have carried for generations. Get a good job. Provide for your family. Be a good husband. Be a good father. Be a good son. Show up as a decent community member. Be a good Christian. Be a good Jew. These things matter. They’re noble, essential even. They keep families alive and communities from falling apart. I honor them.

But here’s the truth: just because you are responsible does not mean you are response-able. That’s the deeper cut. And it’s where Viktor Frankl takes us when he says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That’s the polished version. But let’s be real. Between shit and response there is a space. And it isn’t neat or tidy. It isn’t some quiet Zen garden where you hum a mantra and float out enlightened. It’s a fucking messy, scary, shameful, shadowy space.

WELCOME TO THE UNDERBELLY

That space is where your unresolved junk lives—the wounds you never healed, the shame you never faced, the fear you never admitted, the grief you never let out. It’s where your father’s voice still echoes, where your mother’s wounds still bleed, where your failures and betrayals and secret addictions still lurk.

It’s the man who works himself into the ground but still feels like a fraud. The man who hides behind porn or booze because intimacy feels impossible. The man who explodes at his kids because he never dealt with his own father’s rage. The man who buries his depression under work, money, or “being the good guy.”

Most men don’t want to go there. So they don’t. They leap right past it. They skip the space entirely. And the result is reaction.

REACTION = ENSLAVEMENT

Life hits you—traffic, bills, your wife saying she doesn’t feel seen, your kid melting down, your boss cutting you off at the knees, another blindside you didn’t see coming—and boom, you react. Your kid mouths off and you snap. Your wife pushes and you shut down. Your boss humiliates you and you rage in your car the whole way home. You get knocked down by life and you ghost everyone who loves you.

Or you grab the nearest escape. You pour another drink. You open porn. You pop the pills. You light up. You raid the fridge. You scroll yourself numb. You chase sex without intimacy. You bury yourself in work so no one notices how lost you are. You get busy, distracted, or high enough to not feel.

That’s not responding. That’s surviving. That’s fight, flight, or freeze—your reptilian brain calling the shots. It feels automatic because it is. And the longer you live like that, the less alive you actually are. Reaction isn’t freedom. Reaction is slavery.

CROSSROADS OF A MAN

I’ve seen it all. The man with the house, the car, the family—who confessed he was a ghost in his own life, jerked around by everyone else’s expectations. The man who lost his business and drowned his rage and shame in whiskey until he nearly lost everything else. And the father who buried his son and wanted to bury himself too—until he stepped into the space instead of skipping it. He told me, “I can’t bring him back, but I can carry him forward.” That’s response. That’s freedom in the middle of hell.

And that’s what I want for myself, and for every man I walk with. Not to just survive. Not to check the boxes of being “responsible” while secretly suffocating. But to thrive. To live awake. To expand the space so wide that I can finally breathe.

SHIT MAKES THE BEST SOIL

Frankl’s discovery wasn’t that the shit stops coming. It never stops. His discovery was that in between the shit and your response there is a space. And in that space lies your only real freedom. Most men can’t see that. The space is too small. But the real reason? That shitty space is scary. And, well, it smells like shit. It’s the last place you want to stand. It feels raw, humiliating, overwhelming. It’s easier to skip it and go straight to reaction—grab the bottle, the porn, the pills, the phone—anything but face the stink of your own shadows.

But here’s the paradox: that same shitty space is also fertile. Shit is fertilizer. If you face it, work it, and own it, it becomes the very soil where the seeds of meaning grow. The work I do with men is helping them face their shit, expand that space, and learn to be response-able—turning life’s shit into seeds of purpose and power.

And in that expanded space you breathe. You pause. You remember you don’t control what just happened, but you control how you meet it. You look at the shame instead of burying it. You wrestle with the anger instead of leaking it everywhere. You sit with the grief instead of drowning it in booze or porn. You face the demons instead of running from them. You let the wounds finally heal instead of infecting them with more reaction. That’s what it means to respond. That’s how shit becomes soil.

THE ONLY REAL POWER

Everything else will be stripped from you—your job, your possessions, your reputation, even the people you love most. But your response—your choice—never disappears. Every time you expand the space and choose, you engrave it into reality. You plant the seed. You leave a mark that outlives you. That’s real power. Not power over others, but power over your circumstances, over your reaction, over yourself.

That’s what Frankl discovered in the camps. That’s what I’ve seen with the men I walk with. And that’s what will make you free.

So here’s the question: Will you keep skipping the space, reacting, living unconscious, enslaved to fear? Or will you expand it—step into the mess, face your shadows, wrestle your demons, breathe through the shame—and turn life’s shit into the seeds of meaning?

Because between shit and response there is a space. And in that space lies your power, your growth, your freedom. Expand the space. Plant the seeds. Grow the man you were meant to be.