“We shouldn’t be letting men and boys get to the point that I did.”

Luke Bateman said that on the Keegan and Company podcast, and he would know exactly what that point looks like.

You might know him as a Canberra Raiders footballer, or as the bloke from your feed holding up a fantasy novel from the cab of his tractor. Between those two lives is a story he spent most of his life hiding.

He grew up in western Queensland, around men who were tough and didn’t talk about what was going on underneath.

Then he found books, and with them the parts of himself that felt true. Kind. Soft. Gentle.

He was about seven when he started describing himself like it needed an excuse. “I’m just kind. I’m soft. I’m gentle.” His parents loved him as he was. He’d picked the rule up from everywhere else. Soft was the thing you had to explain away

So he hid it. By high school he’d wait for the library to empty before borrowing a book, and never once pulled one out in front of the boys. Books were the one place he could be soft. “I couldn’t be that in the real world,” he said.

Hiding a huge part of who you are doesn’t come free.

“I was drowning in shame for so long.”

When he left for professional footy, reading fell away and gambling took its place. It became an addiction he was powerless to.

He was an NRL player on good money who couldn’t afford his own groceries, whose mum ended up paying his mortgage and ordering his food to the door.

And it took him to a place where he no longer wanted to be here.

What pulled him back was rehab and a lot of small pieces of unglamorous work, until the real Luke turned out to be the kid who loved books all along.

We see this every day. Boys walk into our workshops wearing a mask, the version of themselves they’ve decided is safe, the person the world has said they “should be”.

What shifts it is never a lecture. It’s seeing a bloke who’s strong and kind at once, who reads and feels things and hasn’t lost a gram of his strength for it.

Boys can’t be what they can’t see.

Before Luke shares anything now, he asks himself one question. Is this what the ten-year-old me needed to see?

When he talks about the future, he talks about being a dad, and loving his kids openly. He put it like this:

“Love, compassion, kindness, empathy. They are strengths. That is what makes us strong as men.”

So Luke, thank you. For telling the truth about the years you spent hiding, and for showing boys they never needed to hide it at all.

For role modelling a way to be a man that’s kind and gentle and strong all at once.

For proving the kid who loved books and the bloke standing here now were always the same person, and for being the role model that ten-year-old Luke never had.

Because of you, a lot of boys get to learn early what took you years to work out. There was never only one way to be a man.

💚