I began work on this website a few months ago, amid sweeping changes in my life. As I navigated this upheaval, one truth grew steadily clearer: the root of my creative stagnation was not a lack of discipline or inspiration, but a lack of self in the work.

What does it mean, truly, to put oneself into their work?

The question circled endlessly in my mind. Again and again, the ancient image surfaced: the knight confronting the dragon. A tired symbol perhaps, but perfect in its simplicity. To put oneself into the work is to make struggle public. To grapple with the beast, doubt, fear, imperfection, before the eyes of others. That is the only kind of authenticity worth anything.

Everyone wrestles with something. Most do it in silence. Anonymity, especially in the creative realm, offers a kind of refuge. It allows the thinker to sever their ideas from their life, to present pure abstractions with surgical confidence. The ideas may be true, but where is their origin? Where is the blood? If the creator is hidden, what gives the work its authority? By what process did the conclusions emerge? Do they live by what they preach? These unspoken questions plague the mind of the reader. When unanswered, they lead only to dismissal. We must not hide. We must meet our intellectual adversaries face to face, not masked, not vague. We must forge a character in harmony with our convictions.

For years, I created behind a veil. I preached standards I had not fully embodied. That, I now see, is a quiet form of fraud. Even when the ideal is correct, to claim it from a distance is to rob it of its power. It is to forfeit the opportunity to mark it as a destination, not a possession. The journey has more value when others can see it being walked.

Original thought is rare. What we call thinking is often a matter of curation, choosing between concepts as one might choose between garments. We encounter forms, ideas, and attitudes, and we try them on, combining them into something resembling coherence. That is not weakness. It is the real work of forming a mind. My aim here is to offer insight, not as an oracle, but as a fellow curator, into the ideas that have shaped my resistance to the dominant materialism of our age.

Yet I hesitate. Recent events have reminded me that transparency is not without cost. Threats, both spoken and acted upon, are the price of honesty in a time of intellectual cowardice. Still, we must not cower. To retreat is to die before death. I will not permit that.These writings will be a ground for sorting and archiving the ideas that pass through my life, some kept, some discarded. This first post has taken far too long, and even now I question whether it makes sense. Perhaps it doesn’t.

But as Mishima warned, language corrodes. The more we dwell in abstraction, the more we risk paralysis. We become watchmakers building clocks we cannot read. I intend instead to pursue mastery in both word and flesh. To act as well as to think. To make my life the crucible of my work. Only then can it be called authentic.