“I came to fix one thing. I stayed for everything else.”
A member's story, in his own words: why he walked into his first circle a sceptic, and what made him keep coming back.
I'll be honest: I only came because a mate dragged me. I'd had a rough year, work was a mess and things at home were worse, and someone told me to “just try a circle.” I expected drumming. I expected to be asked how I felt about my father. I nearly didn't go.
What I got instead was eleven men in a room, a cup of tea, and a simple question: how are you, actually? Not the version you give your colleagues. The real one. And for the first time in a long time, I answered it honestly out loud.
Nobody tried to fix me. They just made room. That turned out to be the thing I'd been missing for about a decade.
James
I came to fix one thing, the stress. I stayed because I realised I'd been doing everything on my own, and I didn't have to. A year later these are some of the closest friendships I've got. I still don't know how that happened in a Tuesday-night Zoom, but it did.
If you're reading this the way I'd have read it a year ago, sceptical, arms folded, just go once. You don't have to share. You don't have to be a “men's group” person. Just sit in the room and see what happens.
