Who am I Really?

Hello. Hope you're doing well. This is my attempt to try to explain to you, whoever you might be reading this, what I care about, and things I'd like to see in my life. Like, what am I really about? If I'm diligent with this page, hopefully the answer to that question should change frequently over time.

These days, however, I find myself concerned a lot about sincerity, and a lot about connection. It feels like the world is trying to atomize people a lot these days. Lots more people living alone, and the majority of our interactions are online, sterile, and devoid of the warmth (and chaos) of face-to-face interaction. Of course I'm not the only one to make this observation, and I'm sure you've felt the same way many times as well.

At the end of the day, I imagine that most of us, maybe all of us, just want to be loved, and when I say "loved", I mean to be truly loved. That is, to be loved for who we are, with our flaws. But such love is hard to even comprehend at first, and we are not taught to seek it, especially not young men in modern America's society.

For example, I think I love the man Elon Musk more than any of his entourage and yes-men do. And by that, I mean I love Elon to the point where I want him to be truly happy. Because when you look at the man, and all the shenanigans he gets up to, you can tell that he is absolutely miserable, because what kind of happy person spends all of their free time tweeting and riling up "the libs" on Twitter when they have billions of dollars to do literally anything else with?

The people egging him on don't care about him. They are exploiting the fact that he's easily manipulated by flattery to eke out some material gain for themselves, whether it's an appointment to a lucrative or powerful position, an endorsement of their latest crypto-scheme, or maybe just because they want to hear a rich person say that they're smart. But in the end, all of this pandering isn't actually love. In a way, Elon is a slave to them. A happy, willing slave, but a slave nonetheless.

Love pierces and discerns and reminds the soul of their true, inherent worth, and sometimes, that process can be painful and uncomfortable. There are so many good examples of this journey in media, and I just want to highlight one of my favorites. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace Clarence Scrubbs is turned into a dragon for being such a pest. And when that happens, so begins his long night of the soul. Being unable to distract himself by saying rude and insulting things, or acting like a prick like he used to do, he's forced to grapple with his own inner thoughts for a long time for the first time. I'm not the biggest fan of how C.S. Lewis depicted Eustace's inner journey here, as a lot of it was kind of going over the remorse of

fan of C.S. Lewis' depiction of Eustace's And though the form of his punishment might seem a bit whimsical, it's ultimately a very fitting one. He had led a life without self- reflection or empathy for others, and that had rendered him separate from the warmth of human interaction. As a big scary dragon, people naturally recoil from him in fear, and those who don't know him would try to kill him or run from him on sight. Because of his bulk, he can't hug anyone because he'd crush them to death, and he can't speak his mind either, since his dragon voice box wasn't able to replicate human speech.