Reflection: The Beast Within
Chapter two is something reminiscent of my beginnings at my sales job. One thing my then-boss pushed on me was to adapt my appearance to look more like a salesman. My clothes made me look too much like a teacher, I needed to purchase suits and look more professional. Over the course of those nine months there I probably spent over a thousand dollars trying to look the part that I didn’t feel I was. These suits were a costume, one that could make me feel powerful and important, but one that never really seemed to fit. It was actually funny how some people who only met me after I started working there and wearing those clothes reacted after I stopped working there and wore my normal clothes. Many would say “Wow! You look great in the casual look!” Thinking about it now, that was probably because I was far more comfortable in jeans and a hoodie than I ever was in a suit.
Success comes with a great deal of dismissal. We dismiss proper treatment of others, we dismiss social convention, and we dismiss who we are. In fairness to Grey in this part of the story, even though he doesn’t realize what he is yet, he is in fact a monster. The Beast, the voice in his mind, is pushing him towards self preservation and self fulfilment beyond anything else, and part of me feels that this is really our biggest flaw as a modern society. Humans are communal creatures, we’re tribal by nature. Once we’re removed from a tribe, or if we’re put into a dangerous tribe that would just as easily cast us out as it would welcome us in, we’re going to become monsters too.
The tribe I was becoming a part of at that time wasn’t a good one, and I learned that fairly quickly, though I did manage to bond with some of the people there that were actually worthwhile people who hadn’t let the culture destroy the best parts of them. What I was as a person at that point was isolated. My friends are all about a thousand miles away, my family is too, and I was pouring all my time and energy into trying to find success in a career that sought to use me until I was no longer of value to them before throwing me away. Looking back, there are a lot more parallels between this story and the world it's based in and my story in the world I live in than I realized at the time. Stories reflect reality and rhyme with history. It is my sincerest hope that this remains true as this story continues on.
Overall reflection here: Sometimes the thing that we need most of all in life is bubbling right below the surface of our thoughts. What we think we need, what we try and take on in order to feel like we’re successful or heading towards success is really the albatross that will bring us down, but if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to break free of it before we sink completely and latch on to what’s really important in the end.
