The Catastrophe of Success
(excerpts)

But life should require minimal effort. You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarrassing people in the world for they continually remind you of inequities which we accept as the proper thing. The sight of an ancient woman, gasping and wheezing as she drags a heavy pail of water down a corridor to mop up the mess of some drunken overprivileged guest, is one that sickens and weighs upon the heart and withers it with the shame for this world in which it is not only tolerated but regarded as proof positive that the wheels of democracy are functioning as they should without interference from above or below. Nobody should have to clean up anybody else's mess in this world. It is terribly bad for both parties, but probably worse for the one receiving the service.

Once you know... that the heart of a man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to.

You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you "have a name" is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own violation.

Purity of the heart is the one success worth having.
~ Tenenssee Williams

I'm trying. And about that part about being yourself. I'm starting to feel like, i've never had that part of me defined before. Or at least I thought I had her defined. Now I just look around me, and feel unbearably uncomfortable in my own skin. I don't know what to express, and how. More so, i don't know who.