YOU WANNA SPIRAL?

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CHAPTER 1 THE MASK

What occurs when the mask fractures?

What happens when the collective agreement to appear “fine” dissolves?

If everyone abandoned the performance at once,
the architecture of normalcy would tremble.

Because once you become conscious of the persona you inhabit in every room,
you cannot unknow it.

I was raised in the high desert outside Los Angeles —
a landscape of modest homes, inherited ambitions,
and quiet assumptions about who would become something.

From early on, I sensed there was a ledger being kept.

Sometimes it wasn’t subtle.

A child once approached me on a playground and said:

“I’m not allowed to be friends with you.
My parents said you’re a bad kid.”

He ran back to play.

I remained — suspended in premature awareness.

Moments like that sediment.
They do not evaporate.

You begin to understand that some children are furnished with futures,
while others are issued disclaimers.

The mask forms quietly in response.
Not from deception —
from adaptation.

CHAPTER 2 WHEN THE WORLD BREAKS

Then my brother died.

And something interior collapsed.

Grief did not arrive theatrically.
It arrived as subtraction.

The atmosphere dimmed.
Color withdrew from the margins.

Substances ceased to function as rebellion.
They became anesthesia.

Beneath every decision was a refrain:

“You will never amount to anything.”

When a narrative is rehearsed often enough — externally and internally —
it ceases to be accusation
and becomes ontology.

So I inverted it.

If failure was inevitable,
I would operationalize it.

There is a peculiar seduction in fulfilling a prophecy others have written for you.
It feels like authorship.

But it is merely compliance disguised as defiance.

When the collective anticipates your collapse,
self-destruction masquerades as agency.

So I inhabited the mask.

Not because I believed it.

Because I was exhausted from resisting it.

CHAPTER 3 SURVIVAL MODE

Homelessness accelerates identity decay.

Abstraction disappears.
Instinct remains.

To acquire food, I became innocuous —
disarming, articulate, clean.

To navigate darker economies, I became older than my years —
measured, unreadable, hardened.

These were not moods.

They were constructed interfaces.

Incarceration refined the process.

I entered naïve to its hierarchies and unwritten codes.
I moved without understanding the grammar of power.

That ignorance has a cost.

Eventually, strength was extracted from me the only way that system knows how.

Another mask emerged —
one forged not from shame,
but from necessity.

CHAPTER 4 THE SYSTEM

Rehabilitation.
Judicial oversight.
Bi-weekly contrition.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Compliance is choreography.

I learned to perform it with precision.

Simultaneously, I entered sales —
an arena where identity is currency.

Six figures my first year.
I could translate hesitation into signature.
Convert doubt into obligation.

Sales revealed something unsettling:

Human beings are situational.

We are fluid across environments.
Morality bends under incentive structures.

The most persuasive individual is often just the one who understands the room faster than anyone else.

The mask was no longer reactive.

It became strategic.

CHAPTER 5 POWER & DISINTEGRATION

Years later, inside that same carceral ecosystem,
I understood the mechanics.

Hierarchy.
Information control.
Calculated silence.

Authority is theater stabilized by belief.

I rose within it.

Position creates gravity.
Gravity attracts scrutiny.

One miscalculation —
and equilibrium fractures.

Power does not erode slowly.

It evaporates.

Another identity dissolved.

CHAPTER 6 COLLAPSE

When I reentered civilian life,
the earlier persona — the charismatic, high-performing salesman —
no longer adhered.

By then, access to my daughter had been restricted.

There is a particular violence in paternal separation.

It does not explode.
It corrodes.

My voice flattened.
My presence thinned.

One afternoon, a homeowner asked a simple question:

“Are you okay?”

There was no script left.

I stepped outside and wept.

Not theatrically.
Not strategically.

Because there was nothing left to maintain.

That was the final in-home pitch of my career.

CHAPTER 7 THE ARTIST

Art was not a pivot.

It was extraction.

For the first time, I ceased adjusting myself to the room.
I began constructing one.

Creation is not therapy in the sentimental sense.
It is confrontation.

It requires you to observe yourself without distortion.

That is the origin of the Watcher.

Not mysticism.
Not paranoia.

Awareness.

The Watcher is the moment you recognize
you are both the actor
and the observer.

The conditioned self
and the one who questions it.

CHAPTER 8 THE AGREEMENT

Before you move on, pause.

Consider the version of yourself you perform daily.

The one calibrated to survive family expectations.
Professional hierarchies.
Cultural scripts.
Digital optics.

Who authored that version?

Was it you?

Or was it negotiated through a thousand subtle pressures?

We inherit more than DNA.

We inherit collective agreements.

Agreements about what success looks like.
What masculinity looks like.
What stability looks like.
What failure is allowed to be.

Most of us sign these contracts unconsciously.

You were shaped.

So was I.

The difference is this:

I began to watch it happening.

CHAPTER 9 THE WORK

My career is not an escape from society.

It is an interrogation of it.

I am not trying to decorate walls.

I am attempting to dismantle inherited scripts.

Through painting, writing, and visual archives,
I document psychological conditioning and its rupture.

I am building a body of work that:

• Exposes the masks we were handed.
• Validates the instability beneath performance.
• Gives language to grief before it calcifies.
• Questions systems that reward suppression over truth.
• Transforms collapse into authorship.

If the work succeeds,
it will not merely sell.

It will destabilize something.

It will cause someone to stand in front of a canvas
and recognize the architecture of their own becoming.

CHAPTER 10 THE MIRROR

You are not broken.

You are patterned.

And patterns can be studied.

Once you observe the mask,
you have a choice.

Continue performing.

Or begin redesigning.

The Watcher exists because I refused to remain unconscious inside my own performance.

Now you are reading this.

Which means you are watching too.

This archive is living.

You can consume it.

Or you can become part of it.

Interpret accordingly.