This is your life from 250,000 miles away. It’s bright; it’s colorful; it’s splotchy. There’s some blue; there’s some white; there’s some brown. Trouble is, there’s no detail. All the little clues and nuances and hints that make life so, je ne sais pas, they’re all gone.

From 250,000 miles away, you look around and all you see is gray. All you see is a sterile place. Sure, it’s pure and beautiful and small, but it isn’t real. People can’t live here and be people; they must instead be idealizations. This is where stereotypes and essences and generalizations all live. They live 250,000 miles away. Writers, or some writers at least, they live here too.

You walk down the street; you see people; you avoid eye contact; you think about what you see. What you see is humanity. Humanity doesn’t exist, except as an illusion from 250,000 miles away—where the perfect people live. The perfect people make humanity sing and dance and sin or whatever else you can image shadows on the wall doing. That’s because all "humanity", the idea of everyone, everywhere, is merely a shadow cast by six billion people. So, we cosmic second graders that can’t sleep squint at the wall and tell stories about the lives of these shadow men.

Humanity is a shadow play. Unfortunately, all the shadows are curious about the script of the play. There are two general scientific methods for gathering data about something like humanity, a shallow scan of lots of people or an in depth study of a few. This is a case study. We’re going to look at one tiny thing and make assumptions about the big things of which it’s a part. I am the thing at which we will look. Humanity is the thing we will draw hypothesis about. Let’s begin.

In a lot of ways, we’re all children. Probably, the most important way is that we are all the children of some people somewhere, either living or dead. Another way in which we are like children is we are all shaped by our childhood.

Fear is a silly emotion. Like all other emotions, it self replicates by feeding on itself: love begets love, anger begets anger, etc. What makes fear silly is its uselessness. There’s no reason to worry about asking a girl out; your life is not in danger. Even if a bear attacks you, you’re better of staying calm and not wasting brain power on some paralyzing emotion.

I’m really only afraid of two things, alligators and snakes. As it so happens, in my first nightmare, when I was four years old, my house was full of alligators and snakes, which transformed into one another. I woke up scared and ran downstairs and was given Sprite. That I was not reprimanded for being up late was surprising to me. Four year olds have a skewed perspective on life.

Fourteen years later, I’m still a little scared of alligators and snakes. I don’t go to pieces when I see them at a zoo or something silly like that. However, if I’m near a lake alone at night in an alligator inhabited part of South Carolina, suddenly the thought will flash into my mind, and I will return to my hotel room. Or if I’m walking in the woods and a snake surprises me, I’m fairly set on edge for some time. Fairly normal behavior, I think. But eighteen year olds have a skewed perspective on life.

When I was a kid, I was afraid to talk to my parents. I was afraid of disappointing them. I was afraid of being rejected. If I broke something around the house, as kids are wont to do, I would tell no one and hope no one would ask me. If asked about the incident, I would shatter under my parents' gaze. As I became older, my parents never had to ground me, just speak with me firmly and I crumbled. To this day, I'm still fairly unnerved by authority figures speaking to me.

I am a child in a lot of ways. Maybe you are too. After all, we're all in this shadow play together. The silhouettes of shapes dance together on the wall, while the wind outside your window howls, and you smile and pull up the toasty covers and drift off into slumber, secure.