Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood And Back Again

Content Warning: This story contains mature themes intended for adult audiences. Reader discretion is advised. ***** The Manhood Diaries is an unfiltered secret collection of male confessions: raw, intense, and deeply personal. Told through the voices of different men, each story peels back the layers of masculinity to reveal desire, vulnerability, power, and hidden truths rarely spoken aloud. Through their experiences, the book explores manhood from within: the struggles, the secrets, the passions, and the contradictions. Bold and unapologetic, it offers a gripping look into the private worlds men live but seldom share.

My name is Noah Brooks, and according to my father, I committed one unforgivable crime… I was born a girl. Apparently, that means my older brother, Owen is destined to inherit the legendary Brooks hockey legacy, while I’m expected to clap from the sidelines and pretend I’m not the better player. Yeah… absolutely not. So when my brother suddenly can’t play for Blackridge University’s elite hockey team, I do what any perfectly reasonable, mentally stable girl would do. I steal his identity. Now I’m living as Owen Brooks, sharing a dorm with twenty sweaty hockey players, hiding in bathroom stalls to change clothes, praying nobody notices my voice cracks every five seconds, and trying very hard not to die every time someone suggests group showers. Easy. Except my roommate is Jace Donovan. Campus hockey god. Professional pain in my ass. Certified menace. And unfortunately… my brother’s best friend, plus my long-time crush Jace has an annoying habit of barging into our room half-naked, stealing my food, invading my personal space, and looking at me like he knows I’m hiding something. Which would be bad enough… …if I wasn’t slowly falling for him. Now I’m pretending to be the guy he’s known for years while secretly crushing on him like an absolute idiot. Even worse? He keeps getting weirdly protective of me. The lies are piling up. The championship is getting closer. My identity is hanging by a thread. And if Jace finds out the truth… I won’t just lose hockey. I’ll lose him too.

The only way where someone can ever be more than a man is when the person is a woman pretending to be a man. It was never Penn wish to don on male clothing and act like a man but it was the only thing she could do if she wanted to survive. Living on the streets before she came across a man whose character was erratic and unpredictable, the man offered Penn to be his heir and Penn had no choice but to accept because her life depends on the protection which the man could offer. Penn secret was discovered by her new adopted father who wanted her to remain in her guise as a man to deal with certain issues and cause an insurgency which the man was convinced that Penn was perfect for. Keeping her identity a secret from others and at the same time planning to take down the empire is more than enough work for anybody could handle and as if that was not enough. She just had to learn some deep secrets about her family that seemed to tilt everything she believed in and fall for the Prince even when she knows that she was trying to dethrone his father. Yeah, Penn life was capital letters COMPLICATED. ••

“Let him go right now.” Wait a second, did he just call me him? And then it hit again! Over here, I am a HE, not a SHE. Idris, not Irish. Before you roll your eyes and use the F words, this is my story, not yours. They said when life throws you lemons, you make lemonade, but I made a whole juice. Being in this college with not just a different name, but a different sex, is chaos on its own, one I’m fully embarked on. “Desperate times require drastic decisions.” I took those words way too seriously. How I plan to survive this journey is totally up to me. Will I be caught? That’s up to you to find out.

When my best friend and I went for prenatal checkups, we both found out we were carrying babies with the super-male gene. The doctor advised us to terminate the pregnancies. I immediately went through with it, but my best friend was hesitant. I kindly advised her, "This child will ruin your life someday." She reluctantly agreed. Later, her husband cheated on her and tried to justify it. "If you can't give me a son, why shouldn't someone else?" Her husband's mistress chimed in, "What's the point of a woman who can't bear sons?" As a result, she blamed everything on me. When I wasn't paying attention, she poisoned my water and watched me die. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day of our prenatal checkup.

For seven years, my husband told me I was the problem. He said I was too much, too soft, too broken to give him a child. I believed him, until the night of our anniversary, when I found two pink lines on a test… and found him on the study sofa with my best friend. She was pregnant too, his baby. She had been pregnant for months, I did not scream, I did not cry in front of them. I picked up my things, walked out with nothing, and never looked back. I built a new life in a city where nobody knew my name. I found a home. I found work I loved. I found a man who looked at me like I was never broken at all. Months later, my ex-husband showed up, begging me to come back now that he knew the truth: the baby was his too. He wanted me back the moment he realized what he lost. He was too late. I did not need his name. I did not need his money. I did not need him. While he lost everything he built on lies, I built a life that was finally, completely mine.