I FOUND IT.

These words were written in large black paint on the white wall of our yearbook office in high school. The phrase, both declarative and yet somehow hinting at things left unsaid, is sometimes brought up when I talk to my old friend Fletch. Fletch was the editor of The Cupola, our high school yearbook at Georgetown Prep, the all-boys Jesuit high school in Maryland. In the early 1980s we spent hours in that office putting together the Cupola, toiling under that phrase: I FOUND IT. We had no idea who the original author was. It seemed to always have been there, like the universe. 

I recently reconnected with Fletch at the Georgetown Prep homecoming—although “reconnected” is probably the wrong phrase. The bonds boys form at Prep are very strong, and we tend to be friends for life—frequently interacting with one another. A writer for a magazine is doing a profile of me, and one of the things she marveled at was the fact that I still communicate with my high school buddies a couple times a month. It’s more frequent with Fletch. By the way, that’s not his real name. I just call him that because he’s a tall, handsome golf instructor who reminds me of the old Chevy Chase character in the movie Fletch. 

At homecoming, Fletch and I walked through the old campus, making sure to stop in the old yearbook office, which was in the basement of the oldest building on campus, dating back to 1919. The school itself began in 1789, as part of Georgetown University, but eventually moved to Maryland. What was once our office is now an empty room. I FOUND IT had long ago been covered with a new coat of white paint. The new yearbook office is in a shiny new building on the other side of campus.

Still, the spirit of I FOUND IT lives on at Prep. Its concrete definiteness, yet Zenlike opacity, describes seeking and then finding your destiny. For those of us who worked in that old basement office as teens, it was crucial that we felt like we had a destiny. The Jesuits were once known as “the Pope’s Marines” and went out as missionaries to “penetrate the world,” which is overtly masculine in its imagery and energy.

Young men today are rarely given the same sort of bold marching orders. In fact, article after article depicts a crisis among young men, who are lonely, addicted, and depressed. They are spending thousands of dollars on sexual websites simply to get messages from women asking how their day is going. 

November is Jesuit Heritage Month, and however much the order is criticized for being liberal, the Jesuits of my day gave me and my friends something that is missing today—the belief that we have a destiny, and that part of being a man is to find it and live it.

In his book Under Saturn’s Shadow: the Wounding and Healing of Men psychologist James Hollis examines how rites of initiation for adolescent boys were once a common and crucial part of tribal and community life. Strong and moral adult males oversaw rituals that signaled to young men their responsibilities upon joining the larger world. Carl Jung described it, in a quote used by Hollis in Under Saturn’s Shadow:

That gives peace, when people feel they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal … a career, producing of children, all are Maya [illusions] compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.

Boys need fathers and male friends to encourage them that life is meaningful and that they have a destiny—men who will stick by them when things get rough. Fletch has been that kind of a friend to me, and it has everything to do with the fact that we went to Georgetown Prep, an all-boys school, and that the place was, and is, suffused with spiritual energy.

An athlete who got sidelined in high school after an injury, Fletch instead poured himself into being the editor of our yearbook. He was a soft-spoken leader with a steady hand during a time when there was often a lot of chaos around him. He could always gently cajole me to stay long hours after school to type up some pages, or to go over photographs. In Under Saturn’s Shadow, James Hollis talks about how great male friends will challenge you and even “wound” you in a way to transform you into something greater. Fletch edited my copy and channeled my diffuse ADHD energy—sometimes with tough love. He would just flat-out say “No” if something didn’t work. He was usually right.

Most of the time, however, we were on the same page, and the results could be brilliant, even hilarious. Fletch’s photographs were high quality and still withstand scrutiny some 40 years later. I wrote the captions, and Fletch encouraged witticisms, sexual innuendo, and inside jokes. We often found ourselves in battles with the faculty yearbook advisor. We would try different ploys, including changing words around, to try and get our stuff into the Cupola. One picture we used was two guys in the school gym who appeared in—shall we say, in an awkward position. Fletch and I spent a week submitting caption after caption, all full of snark and inuendo and all of them shot down. They were right to shoot them down, of course, but our stubborn efforts also honed our skills and our friendship.

The hours I spent at work with Fletch in that basement were training for a life spent hammering out your own destiny and not backing down. The bond he and I formed under the banner of I FOUND IT gave us the defiance we would need nearly 40 years later, when I was targeted in a political attack that, overnight, became a national obsession. In the chaos that followed, I was abandoned by almost everybody—but not by Fletch. When things were at their darkest, he contacted me. Sitting in a motel room to avoid the press, I got a text: “Mark. I am your friend.”

In the following weeks, the media would cite my books, pick through our high school yearbook—the same volume Fletch and I had worked on together—resurrect tales from our keg parties from the early 1980s, and chase down idiotic rumors about us from people who hardly knew us but had a political axe to grind. Fletch called me nearly every day, giving support, advice and—importantly—getting angry with me. We slipped into that comfortable frequency only friends can share, a connection that is crucial for men, allowing them to talk freely about depression, politics, art, and women with total freedom. Meaningless sex, video games, and even bonds with parents cannot replace it.

Fletch also brought his A-game humor. At one point during the media circus around the Kavanaugh nomination, some things we had written in our yearbook and underground newspaper became the focal point of the supposed scandal. Over the phone, I told Fletch that reporters had latched onto something particularly obnoxious we had written in our underground newspaper as 17-year-old boys almost 40 years ago.

There was a pause. Then he said it.

“Is it too late to print a retraction?”

It was funny, but it was also defiant. We weren’t going to let them kill us. 

Men who are not properly initiated and who have no purpose or tribe of fellow brothers to call their own can suffer depression, rage, and a lifelong inability to handle relationships. In Under Saturn’s Shadow, James Hollis offers this:

What the modern man suffers from, then, is the wounding without the transformation . . . He is asked to be a man when no one can define it except in the most trivial of terms. He is asked to move from boyhood to manhood without any rites of passage, with no wise elders to receive and instruct him, and no positive sense of what such manhood might feel like.

Wounding without the transformation. It’s a stark phrase that describes too many of America’s young men who find themselves going it alone in a hostile culture.