I remember as an adult, visiting my mother in Florida. She had masks all over her walls. Masks from different cultures that she’d found at secondhand stores.
She set up a mattress for me on the floor in her living room, and I could hardly sleep with all those empty faces hovering above me. It was less creepy knowing my mother had collected them. But still unnerving.
Now that I look back, I think it was an unconscious metaphor for her life—a shrine of sorts—of all the different masks she wore to fit in to the rigid parameters our society sets for people to be deemed ‘enough’ in all the ways it’s suggested we aren’t.
I also think the masks on the wall represented her safe space—her apartment—a place she never let anyone inside.
She’d hang up her masks and try to recover from the long hours of wearing them. To slowly loosen and detach from all their pretenses, so she could just be herself, with the help of a zani-tab or 2 and a vodka, which I don’t recommend, as it wound up being her demise in the end.
It’s exhausting to wear masks. To work so hard to be someone ‘more viable’ than you believe you are. To be someone who appears more important, more intelligent, more sophisticated, more normal, more together, more special... so that others will want to connect with you, instead of leave you out.
Masking hides the unusual, the messy, the atypical, the wild, the vulnerable, the dangerous and the controversial. I imagine we mask because of the fear we have that people won’t approve of who we are underneath the mask.
I bet it’s a primal instinct—masking to fit in—because of some deep ancient fear that we’ll be seen as unsafe, and get disowned and banished by our tribe.
But the problem with masks is, over time, if you go out into the world long enough with them on, it gets harder to take them off.
Not only with others but with ourselves.
It’s hard to be comfortable in our own skin after we’ve given ourselves the message that we aren’t worth the risk to be fully expressed in the world.
I think for me, learning to unmask began with the birth of my son. Turned out, the truest expression of myself was just the thing my son needed to feel understood, comforted, and safe.
And I think it was his listening of who I really was, that made me realize I didn’t need a mask. In fact, the mask would have kept me from connecting with him.
And by being myself, I was also inadvertently teaching my son that there’s never a reason for anyone to pretend to be someone they're not.
To me, the greatest tragedy of masking—of pretending to be someone else other than who we experience ourselves to be—is that without our true selves in the world, no one will ever get the chance to know and celebrate who we really are.
-JLK
