We’ve been going about two months now. Andy’s Man Club in Louth opened around Easter, and honestly, for the most part it’s working. Blokes are coming back. New faces turn up most weeks. We’re getting 8, 9, sometimes 10 or 11 men in the room on a Monday night, and men are actually talking. Properly talking. That’s the whole point, and it’s happening, so credit where it’s due.
I’m still talking too. Not every week. Some weeks I don’t have anything that needs to come out, and that’s fine. Other weeks I do, whether it’s work stuff, my confidence, whatever’s decided to sit on my mind that particular Monday. It varies.
But here’s the thing I didn’t write down when I was putting together my thoughts on how we got started. The bit I glossed over. Because there’s a personal thing that’s getting to me, and it’s nothing to do with the group itself. The group’s fine. This is about me.
We started with 3 facilitators who’d gone through training within a month or so of each other. All of us were there on day one in the new club. And the other two, they’re good blokes. They are clearly blooming good friends and known each other for years. But they’re very… comfortable in the room shall we say. They take up a lot of space, verbally. And I’m finding myself sitting there, not quite sure where I fit.
I feel like the spare part.
Which, if you know anything about my history, is not a new feeling. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like the least significant person in whatever room I walked into. I thought this, becoming a facilitator, being part of something, having a proper purpose on a Monday evening, I thought it would shift that. I thought I’d finally feel like I mattered somewhere.
And in some ways it hasn’t worked out like that. Not yet, anyway.
What I’ve noticed is that I tend to gravitate towards the sweeper role. And don’t get me wrong: the sweeper role at an Andy’s Man Club is not a consolation prize. In my opinion, it’s one of the most important jobs on the night. You stand outside. You welcome blokes as they arrive. But more than that, you watch. You keep an eye out for the ones who’ve pulled up in the car park and haven’t moved. The ones who’ve walked past twice. The ones who clearly want to come in but can’t quite make their legs do it.
Your job is to walk through that door with them.
I love doing that. I really do. There’s something about meeting someone at that exact moment, the moment they’re teetering between going home and stepping in, that feels genuinely useful. It’s the right place for me to be. Before the session starts, I feel good about what I’m doing.
It’s just that once we’re all inside, I’m not sure where I go.
I want to be part of something. Not a spare part of something. There’s a difference, and I know which one I feel like right now.
I don’t know if it’ll shift. Maybe it will. Maybe it needs time, or a conversation, or just me getting a bit more comfortable about taking up space in the room the same way the others do. Or maybe this is just who I am, and I need to make peace with that.
For now, I’ll keep standing outside on Monday nights, waiting for the bloke who needs someone to walk in with him.
Because I know what it’s like to be him.
This is part of my ongoing series of nostalgia posts, written from old notes, scribbles and half-finished thoughts I’ve gathered over the years. Some of it is uncomfortable. All of it is honest. If something here resonates, it was worth writing.
Still here.
That’s the thing really, isn’t it. All this, the feeling like you don’t belong, the wondering whether you matter, the sitting in a room full of people and still feeling invisible. It doesn’t disappear just because you’ve decided to do something good with your Monday evenings.
But I’m still here. And if you recognise any of this, so are you. That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.