BB Guns & Lessons About Health Seeking
Yeah, we should have told someone.
That small white dot in the image above? That’s a BB. It’s been lodged in my jaw since the week before the start of football camp in the summer of 1983.
My cousin and I were doing what a lot of boys did back then, testing limits and pretending to be braver than we were. After popping holes in beer and soda cans we took a quick break. When we returned, he picked up the gun and didn’t remember that was loaded. He fired it inches away from my chin.
There was blood that spattered on the window behind me. There wasn’t in any meaningful pain and the window wasn’t broken or have a chip in it. So, we kept looking for the BB on the ground nearby. After a few minutes, I realized it was probably still stuck in my face.
All of these years, the BB stayed. Not because of medical oversight, but because I insisted I was “fine.” We were both too scared to tell his parents. He wasn’t supposed to have the gun. And, I remember standing in the bathroom mirror, thinking about other teenaged priorities, like whether I would be able to get my football chinstrap on without it pushing too hard on the BB. I kept telling myself, “It’s no big deal.” That sentence, spoken through fear, was the earliest echo of a pattern I’ve seen in myself and in many men: the reflex to minimize, to endure, to avoid vulnerability. These traits can be helpful in certain situations, but sometimes they are just stupid. Especially when they limit men or a boys from getting the care they need.
I thought about that moment again while writing a recent blog, The Perception Gap: What Men Get Wrong About Each Other and Health. In it, I explore how men consistently underestimate each other’s compassion, openness, and willingness to care. We often present as stoic and unshakable, but there are also times when we’re waiting for permission to be real and seek help.
That BB in my jaw is a quiet reminder of how early we start learning to suppress pain and fear, and dismiss care. It’s what Movember’s research calls the “perception gap”, the false idea that other men wouldn’t understand or accept our vulnerability.
There were so many bad choices that day: playing irresponsibly with a loaded BB gun, assuming the safety was on without checking, and then deciding to hide the accident out of fear. We convinced ourselves that telling our parents would mean punishment we couldn’t face, when in reality our parents would have been upset but responsible.
Instead, our silence let a momentary mistake become a permanent reminder; we never told any family members until we were in college. Thus, that BB is still lodged in my face. If I could go back, I’d tell my 14-year-old self to get the situation handled by parents and doctors. Everything else, that’s all going to work itself out.
