4AM Babbling and Introspection

I would really like to be a dark forest.  I want to be a labyrinth that mesmerizes and confuses.

(Mystery.  Darkness.  Empathy.)

Maybe that's what we all are, behind the pretty treeline and the well trimmed hedges.  I have no exclusive claim to any feeling.  But it's so. hard. to find people who will open their gates and share themselves with you.  I crave intimacy and genuineness.  I want to know that there are other people wandering the dense brush with me, albeit along paths many times removed.  It is necessarily solipsistic to say that I'm alone.

Depending on others makes me vulnerable.

to myself.

I've been asking people who they are when they eliminate situational identities.  What is constant?  What makes you you, even if you take out every other person on the planet from the equation?  Generally, people don't seek out those answers.  It doesn't matter to them.  So, should I maintain that understanding one's own identity is universally important for any person, or should I assume that such comprehension is only valuable to a subset of people with some differentiating characteristic?

I don't just desire this knowledge, I need it.  As much as I wish to be perceived as a maze, I struggle to escape what is certainly a tangled mass of body and mind.  To find a vantage point that allows me to see what I am, that enables me to navigate myself and exit to the world around me as I fancy.

The fact that my inherent dissatisfaction with the nature of my existence is particularly salient is a minor detail that has no impact on the universality of our mortality's limits.  Being merely an animal that acts in accordance with the world around it is insufficient.  I can't explain why it is insufficient for everyone, but it absolutely must be.

I am reaching for spotlights, searchlights, flashlights, and all the lights I can find to find my way, and I worry that I'm blinding myself.  The inconsistency of my lens of choice is detrimental to the stability of my path.  Keeping a strong hold on the footsteps directly ahead is necessary for persisting towards the larger accomplishments much farther ahead.