The Mask Also Am: Until I forgot who was

Working as an male escort made me ask myself a question: What is love? Society sells love as something pure and selfless, but the reality is very different from that utopia we've been taught. Love doesn't exist. Because nothing in this world is completely pure. There's only desire and self-interest. Men seek out the most beautiful woman they can get, and women seek out the most handsome and useful man within their reach. You'll rarely see a man willingly choose a woman he doesn't desire when he can choose another whom he does. Nor will you see a woman choose a life of misery when she has the chance to live with someone capable of offering her security. Only a few people break this rule, and, curiously, it is precisely those exceptions who manage to achieve something resembling happiness. Society glosses over all of this with a single word: love. It makes us believe we're the exception while we continue to play the same game. I, too, am part of it-only I'm on the other side of the board. Being an escort allowed me to witness a reality that many prefer to ignore. It taught me to observe the desire, the interest, and the needs that lie behind people, and at the same time, it protected me within a bubble that ultimately made me almost immune to this game of masks. Conscious for some. Unconscious for most. If I had to describe love in a single sentence, it would be this: the downfall of the naive and the tool of the cunning, because no one does anything without getting something in return. But I wasn't always like this. There was a time when I led a completely normal life, when I still believed in certain things and saw the world differently. Until my life took a turn for the worse. And when everything started to fall apart, I also began to see the cogs that drive the world. This book chronicles that transformation: who I was, who I ended up becoming, and everything that happened between those two versions of myself. >