Rebuilding Manhood: How Collecting GI Joe Helped Me Reclaim a Lost Identity

When I first started collecting old GI Joe figures it wasn’t about nostalgia — at least, not only that.

It was something deeper, something harder to name at the time. It was about piecing together parts of myself I thought were lost.

Childhood leaves its marks on all of us. Mine, like so many others, was shaped by early lessons about strength, survival, and silence — the kind that leaves invisible scars. It was also shaped by the absence of a father who was supposed to protect me — and the presence of a man who too often caused harm instead. Abuse has a way of rewriting the way a boy sees himself. It teaches you early that strength means hardness, silence, survival at all costs. It fractures your understanding of masculinity before you even have a chance to build it for yourself.

Trauma, especially when it's carried from a young age, has a way of stealing the simplicity of who you were before. For years, I lived with the edges of PTSD — the hyper-vigilance, the emotional distance, the feeling that I had to be stronger than anyone else just to survive. Somewhere along the way, the boy who lined up plastic heroes on the living room floor got lost under all that fear.

Rediscovering those toys — the battle-scarred GI Joes, or the impossibly muscled He-Man figures — became an act of reclaiming my own narrative. It wasn’t about recapturing childhood exactly; it was about honoring it. About recognizing that the stories I created with those toys — about bravery, honor, leadership, vulnerability — were my first attempts at crafting an identity.

Before the world told me what masculinity should look like, before trauma taught me that emotions were liabilities, I already knew how to imagine strength in ways that weren’t just about domination.

Power dynamics were right there even then — He-Man wasn’t powerful because he crushed others, but because he protected those who couldn't fight for themselves. GI Joe fought not for glory, but for something bigger than himself. As a kid, I understood that instinctively. As an adult, I had to relearn it.

Collecting these pieces now, as an adult, has helped me rewrite my relationship with masculinity. It’s not about being unbreakable. It's about resilience, about kindness that doesn’t apologize for itself, about finding dignity in the daily battles we fight — especially the ones inside ourselves. It's about remembering that vulnerability and strength aren't opposites; they're companions.

The act of collecting — tracking down a missing figure, cleaning a battered toy, setting it carefully on a shelf — has become its own quiet ritual of healing. Each piece is a memory reclaimed, a role reimagined. Each time I place one in my collection, I’m telling the younger version of myself, "You mattered. Your stories mattered. And you still do."

Today, when I look at the shelves stacked with old soldiers and scarred-up heroes, I don’t just see plastic. I see survival. I see a kid who made it through when he wasn’t supposed to. I see a kind of masculinity I’m still trying to understand — part instinct, part rebellion.

Identity isn’t something anyone hands you. It’s something you claw back, piece by piece, in small, stubborn acts that say I’m still here. Sometimes that act looks like a beat-up GI Joe standing his ground on a dusty shelf — a battered survivor holding the line between the boy I was, the man I am, and the man I’m still figuring out how to be.