Changeling

There is that famous line that goes "there are years that ask questions and years that answer." How wonderful a concept that our introspection is often hedged on our confusion, and wisdom is the honor we carry after a courageous journey to the edges of who we are and what we've been led to believe. A year ago I was looking out the window of room 44 at the Chateau Marmont at a fog bank rolling over Sunset Boulevard. A year ago we were approaching midnight on another New Years Eve, the beckoning of possibility and the reckoning of what we did or did not do in the year we were leaving behind. The count down turning the keys into the ignition of another chapter where we ask: am I one step closer to becoming who I want to be? And do I even stand a chance?

As millenials, we've sat at the bottom of the twenty-first century, the age of uncertainty. We're unruly enough to defy anyone who declares to own the future, yet fool hearted enough to believe anyone who claims to understand the past. We are the generation dismantling traditions wedged between conservative ideals on both ends of the social spectrum, usually finding ourselves in psychological exile. We are the harbingers of a collapsed future.

As a group of us hovered around the window in room 44, someone mentioned that this was the spot where Jim Morrison famously performed one of his stunts in 1970, dangling from the window, five stories above ground, taunting death while waving to on-lookers. Morrison, the mystical and iconic frontman of the Los Angeles blues-rock band, The Doors. Both comical and existential, his words and persona sought to explore the eternal ideas of sex, God, and death. He was the opposition to the conceit of the free love movement of his time, and remains, to this day, a rebel of society and a threat to the patriarchy.

Jim was born in 1943, the son of decorated Navy Admiral, George Stephen Morrison. George served during some of the most volatile years in American military history, most notably as the command of U.S. naval forces during the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. A moment that ultimately escalated US involvement in Vietnam. As a father, George embodied a model of masculinity rooted in authority, control, and emotional reserve. He expected conformity, structure, and respect for hierarchy. Due to the demands of Georges career, the family moved frequently, which widened the gap of social isolation for Jim. To cope, he found solace in art, philosophy, and literature, reading Shakespeare, William Blake and Nietzsche. He was known to be quiet, introspective, and highly intelligent; all things that served no purpose in George's worldview. Jim attended UCLA where George hoped his son would eventually pivot in serving in the armed forces just as he'd done. But as tensions grew and anti-war sentiment spread among the youth of America, the counterculture was bred and unbeknownst to George, his son, along with Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and Jon Densmore would be at the helm of the movement as the official lineup of The Doors.

Just a few days into 2025 as I healed from a surgery, I was evacuated from my Hollywood Hills apartment as deadly flames raged through Los Angeles claiming the homes and lives in the tens of thousands. In the months that followed, authoritarian political regimes swept the globe, comedians, journalists, and intellectuals were either being imprisoned or canceled; Charlie Kirk was assassinated, splintering the conversation on racist and religious grifters and gun control, while those with the most power dangled the threat of automation over the working class by weaponizing artificial intelligence as a specter of disposability rather than a tool for collective progress. 2025 was whiplash. An existential pressure point of engineered fragility with the constant suggestion that we are all only one innovation away from being erased. And now, here we are again, another New Year upon us.

I spent much of 2024 asking questions about love and the space it holds for masculinity and femininity. Questions that, in truth, had maybe been locked inside me for my entire life. About pressure, power, tenderness, desire, and ultimately, the ways we are conditioned to fracture ourselves in order to belong. 2024 was the year of the question, 2025 the year of the answer mirrored back to me in the social chaos through the present tense reflecting past virtues. It has taken me a whole year to arrive at a conclusion, and entire lifetime to put it into words.

In 2025, what we began to see was the male experience coming into sharper focus, not out of dominance, but out of erosion. The year brought a massive spike in suicide rates, drug abuse, unemployment, and a major downturn in academic performance and life expectancy, all amongst men, across all ages and races. While history has never seen such widespread disengagement, the absence of self examination and self determination with clarity is nothing new. I don't believe the trope that has long permeated the social zeitgeist that "men know what they want - men go after what they want" is true. Some men know what they want. Some men go after what they want. In 1967, the sudden emergence of Jim Morrison as a rockstar was not a point of pride, but of shock to his family. He eviscerated the future that his father sanctioned for him by becoming unrecognizable: loud where he had been quiet, sensual where he had been reserved, and public where he had been forced to be private. His sudden and stunning success arrived fully formed and outside his fathers permission and values. When The Doors debut album hit the airwaves and charts, Jim's father wrote him a letter demanding that he "give up any idea of singing or any connection with a music group because of what I consider to be a complete lack of talent in this direction." He didn't fear a lack of success, he feared that his son had become an outlier, a man who lived on the margins of society outside of masculine formalities of labor and order.

Men are told what to think far more than they are taught how to reflect or metabolize emotion. Deprived of meaningful rites of passage and stripped of coherent models for self-actualization, many turn to anesthesia or amplification: drugs, gambling, pornography, or the manosphere to numb their confusion or to be told who they are. After all, a dopamine addicted, over medicated and over therapized culture profits from male destabilization because disoriented men are easier to manage. If this wasn't true, then capitalism and the industrial military complex would cease to exist. Women are not spared by this imbalance; we are implicated in it. The broken masculine does not liberate the feminine. It isolates her. We are now reaching across a widening gap that was never meant to exist.

I've witnessed this scene play out in my own life. This past year, through a mutual friend, I was introduced to M*, a man of intelligence and depth, both charming and physically commanding. Our mutual recognition of one another was one that was charged in a way that had become familiar and thrilling for me throughout my adult life. Before pursuing higher education, he opted to join the US Army in an attempt to solidify is manhood. "It was the stupidest decision of my life," he lamented, "I thought it would make me a man, but all it did was expose my weakness." Shortly after he enlisted, the United States declared war in Iraq where he was deployed. The impact of battle echoed all the way into our brief connection, because what I had experienced beyond his warmth was a deep and volatile affliction that pushed me away, and in truth, I'm not certain could ever be remedied. Unfortunately for me, and many others, this was not the first time I had experienced someone like this, but it was my responsibility to manage a pattern of my own that I become accustomed to.

We have all been led to believe that men and women are fundamentally foreign to one another, divided by biology, psychology, and language. Subtly but relentlessly, the culture tells men that they are only valuable by what they produce, while the woman's value lies in the completion of partnership. Even the most independent of us absorb this water. No one opts out cleanly. But the difference between us has been greatly exaggerated. While our lived experiences are distinct and we may process information differently, at the core we all feel the same things. Love, hate, longing, fear...these are not cultural inventions nor are they gendered possessions...they move through all of us. In the end, we are all wanting the same thing: connection.

Ultimately, the question I had been attempting to understand was why I was able to abandon myself in order to feel loved. I never wanted love to feel conditional where connection could only be warm if I was attuned to another persons emotional weather. But somehow, I have been acting under the framework that love could only arrive after adaptation. Somewhere along the way, I learned this from loving fractured men and seeing how badly they wanted to be chosen, respected, and desired. I quietly absorbed the lesson that love is what stabilizes people and gives us permission to exist. So if I could just steady him, then maybe it would complete me. In 2025 I realized that I've been waiting my whole life for the moment where I can be myself. For someone to love me into existence. This is not the feminine nor masculine experience, it is the human experience. To be seen and understood rather than just looked upon is a different level of intimacy that I believe we are all searching for.

After the admonishment of his father, Jim became estranged from his family. When the news or media inquired about them, he flatly responded that they were 'deceased.' Instead of carving himself into the version that his father would love, he defined his own path through radical self acceptance and expression. He surrendered to himself, not the system. I think that Jim Morrison was one of those rare individuals who rode the lines between the physical and spiritual world, often seeing things that many others could not. He spoke about nightclubs being stages for darker human impulses and even predicted the future of electronic dance music thirty years before its invention. Though his life ended at the age of 27, I think he is one of the many examples of how revolutions are born from oppressive systems and ultimately, he understood inherently that true revolutions begin with the self.

Through the low grade hum of fear, humans have always resisted for the sake of our survival. As we enter this new year, I truly believe that beneath the noise, a shift is happening and we are being forced to face ourselves, stripped of distraction, illusion, and borrowed identities; and through this confrontation, something powerful is emerging and we are becoming who we actually are rather than who we are told to be. We are seeing that wholeness is not found through love, but rather, becoming whole without self erasure makes love possible; and because of this, I believe we are at the dawn of a revolution.

Jim Morrison died in Paris in 1971 and was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery. It would take years, but eventually his father rose to acceptance and honored the impact his son had on culture and the world. He was quoted saying: "My son had a unique genius which he expressed without compromise."

During his military career, George studied the Greek language. To tribute his son and encapsulate his ethos, he chose to inscribe a message on his headstone which read Kata ton daimona eaytoy. The translation:

True to His Own Spirit