Rafael Epstein is a journalist who has worked in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Timor, Indonesia, Europe and the Middle East. He has also worked at the Investigative Unit at the Age. Rafael currently hosts the Drive program on 774 ABC Melbourne. His first book, Prisoner X, was published in March 2014.

Dear teenage Raf,

What you should know is that you will grow up into a magnificent young man. That’s the good news. The bad news is it doesn’t happen overnight. It will take a long time, longer than you have been on this little planet. It doesn’t happen easily because becoming a man is not some natural process that you intuitively grow into.

Have you noticed that you are not growing into your body right now? That so many of the other teenagers around you are bigger and have bodies that look like they will grow into a man? Well that will happen to you, even though the pace seems, right now, like it is more than glacial. The bad news is that growing into becoming a man is even tougher. In fact it is the hardest thing that you will do.

You will find someone who loves you just as fiercely, even more spectacularly than the heat you feel inside you right now, for some of the girls that float in and out of your life. And in fact you already have most of what you need to find a job and an identity in the outside world. Your profession is waiting for you. It will fit you like a man’s hand fits perfectly inside a beautifully tailored leather glove. You know how you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up? Don’t worry. Actually, you do know what you want to be. It will come with much hard work and some searching and some dithering along the way. But it is far from your toughest task.

What will come close to breaking you, what will threaten to tear you to pieces, what will give you the greatest succour and joy, even as it gives you the most anxious moments of your life, will be the very making of you. Becoming a man is about finding out who you really are. How you live, how you connect, how you rise to anger, how you give up your own needs, wants and desires for those you truly love. How you learn to foster your character, channel your passions, carve out your identity and enjoy the essence of being you; that is what it means to become a man.

How you think of sex, what you do when you dream of it, how you physically respond to a lover’s demands, to be sure these are a core aspect of what it means to be a man. They can be a foundation but they are nowhere near a complete picture of what it means to tell the difference between desire and true engagement, between loving and taking. It takes time to feel your way into the visceral difference between strength and anger, between providing the solid soil that can allow true love to grow, and simply being strong like the rock that love merely flows over. This is the toughest part of your life. You will need to take a close look at the fibres of your soul, and the toughest reaches of your emotions. But this is the most rewarding part of being alive. So remember to breathe and revel in your hedonism, for they are the simplest of pleasures, but you will even more greatly relish that which you work so hard to understand.