There’s a feeling I can’t quite shake, and I don’t know if I’m finally naming something true or just circling around it the way you circle a place you once lived.

I’ve been watching Yellowstone. Not for the plot, not even really for the characters, but for something harder to explain—something in the landscape. Montana looks like something I’ve been missing without knowing how to say it out loud. It feels like home in a way that doesn’t ask for permission. It feels like my nervous system exhales there, even through a screen.

And I keep noticing what that does to me.

Because it isn’t just the land. It’s what the land holds. The men in it. The kind of masculinity that isn’t performative, or emotionally absent, or brittle in the way I’ve known it. It’s grounded. Quiet in a way that doesn’t avoid feeling, but contains it. And that contrast has been messing with me.

I think I used to believe I hated men.

But I don’t think that’s actually true anymore.

I think I was exhausted. I think I was responding to a very specific version of masculinity I kept running into—one that didn’t know how to stay present, or speak emotionally, or meet me where I actually am instead of where it was comfortable for them to be. And when you run into that enough times, it starts to feel like a category problem instead of a context problem.

But Montana complicates that. So does watching men who feel like they were shaped by something older than ego. Something quieter. Something steadier.

And it makes me ask questions I haven’t wanted to touch.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a sudden rewriting of everything I thought I knew about myself. More like… a soft unraveling of assumptions I didn’t realize I was still carrying.

Because I keep coming back to this: maybe it was never about rejecting men entirely. Maybe it was about never really being met by one in a way that felt safe enough to stay open.

And then there’s my dad.

He sits at the center of all of this, honestly. Not as a contradiction, but as a kind of anchor. The first real example I ever had of what masculinity can be when it isn’t trying to dominate a room or disappear from emotion. He’s the utmost of my affection. That doesn’t feel complicated to me. It feels clean. Certain.

And I think, in some quiet way, he’s part of why I notice the absence of that elsewhere so sharply.

It isn’t that he set a standard I expect everyone to meet. It’s that he showed me something real exists at all.

So when I say I miss Montana, I don’t just mean the mountains or the air or the space to breathe. I mean I miss the version of myself that feels possible there. I miss the groundedness. I miss the feeling that life doesn’t have to be constantly braced against.

It’s almost spiritual, the way it pulls at me. Like something in me recognizes it before my mind can explain it.

And I don’t know yet what to do with that pull.

I don’t know if it means I’m changing, or remembering something, or just finally getting honest about what I actually want.

But I do know this:

It’s not as simple as “I don’t like men.”

It’s more like—I’ve never really had the chance to meet the kind of man who feels like Montana does.

And maybe that’s the whole story. Or maybe it’s just the beginning of one.

Either way, I’m paying attention now.