As a boy, I was afraid of everything.
I grew up in a quiet suburb in St. Catharines, Ontario — the kind of neighbourhood where people would leave their cars unlocked overnight without a second thought. It was so safe, so uneventful, that management once had to send out a memo telling residents to start locking their cars because homeless individuals had begun targeting our area specifically for how careless and trusting everyone was.
Despite all that, I lived in a state of constant fear.
I was terrified someone would break into our home and kill me and my family. Every stranger I walked past seemed like a potential kidnapper. And the idea of going anywhere alone after dark? Impossible. My mind wouldn’t even entertain it — it felt like a death sentence.
But something changed as I grew up.
I can’t pinpoint a specific day or year. It was somewhere in the fog of adolescence, sometime between losing baby fat and gaining a deeper voice, when a sort of invisible switch flipped.
I remember walking home at 2 a.m. after a long day of studying at university. The streets were quiet, the air still, and suddenly this thought hit me: “I’m not afraid at all.”
Not even a little bit.
It surprised me because I could clearly remember the alternate reality of my childhood — that same scenario would have sent me into a panic spiral. Yet here I was, calmly strolling home without a trace of tension in my body.
It made me think about this strange transformation, this moment when boys become men — or at least begin to inherit the psychology of men.
Because the fears I had as a child were not irrational. Someone could show up and try to rob me. Bad things do happen at night. But the fear was gone. So what changed? And why do women — including the women in my own family — still carry that same fear into adulthood?
I started unraveling this by thinking back to one simple pattern from my childhood:
When I was with my dad, I felt completely safe. I could walk anywhere, at any hour, without a sliver of fear. But when I was with my mom, the fear didn’t disappear. It softened, sure, but it was still present — sitting somewhere in the background like a quiet alarm.
The difference, I realized, comes down to threat assessment and something psychologists (and security experts) call security theater.
At its simplest: fear is a calculation.
As a kid, even though I wasn’t consciously thinking about threat levels, something in my brain understood that if someone wanted to harm us, the likelihood of them choosing a man — my dad — as their target was low. He was a deterrent by default. His presence created a bubble of safety because, to a bad actor, attacking a man is a higher-risk decision.
With my mom, that bubble was thinner.
Not non-existent — just thinner.
Her presence didn’t deter a threat the way my dad’s did, and even as a child, I instinctively picked up on that. That’s why the fear remained.
The same logic applies to why I no longer feel afraid walking alone at night:
I look like a man.
The threat calculus for anyone with bad intentions changes dramatically the moment they see that.
And the same logic applies to why women still feel that alertness, that uneasiness, even as fully grown adults: their appearance does not create the same deterrent effect. In plain terms, the simple possibility of harm being attempted is significantly higher for them — not guaranteed, but higher. So the brain keeps running its threat-assessment algorithm in the background. And fear lives in that possibility.
This is what I meant by security theater — not the official term used for staged safety measures, but the broader idea that much of what we perceive as “safety” is psychological. It’s based on signals, appearances, and assumptions about who is a likely target and who is not. My dad didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to be muscular or intimidating. He just had to exist as a man.
And as I got older, I inherited that same shield by default.
That’s what makes this transition from boyhood to manhood so strange: the external world doesn’t change, but your perceived place in it does. As a child, the world feels full of predators and shadows. As a man, you become one of the shadows — not in a predatory way, but in the sense that you are no longer easily preyed upon.
It’s a quiet shift, an invisible one, but it completely reshapes how you move through the world.
And it makes you realize just how differently women experience the exact same streets, at the exact same times, under the exact same circumstances.