The Mask

Halloween isn’t the only holiday you’ll find people wearing masks. People wear masks too large to fit every day and in time you begin to realize that the face you see, isn’t really theirs. Neil Gaiman said it the best when he said, "We are all wearing masks, that is what makes us interesting." We all wear a mask concealing our true identity. We easily turn into the greatest actors to hide pain from those who surround our lives. The mask we wear disguises much more than the face underneath it. It hides who we truly are inside and protects our souls from being tainted and torn in shreds by the harsh judgement of others. The smiles and laughter we display are clever devices hiding our pain and sorrow that we carry within us. And the choices and actions that we make are altered to be deemed adequate by our friends, family, and the strangers that seemingly enter our lives. At first when people get to know you, they are unknowingly lied to, becoming friends with the illusion you created for them to see. As you open up to these people, that is – if you open up to them, they start to see certain aspects hidden beneath the “mask.” These are the things that leave you opened and vulnerable to the possibility of allowing others to hurt you, but again hoping that they don’t. Now imagine that instead of using these vulnerabilities against one another, we supported each other. So as I put more trust in him, as I opened up over time in hopes that he wouldn’t hurt me, he had done what most people usually do – he used my vulnerabilities against me. Because that wasn’t the exact same girl that he had met the first night. They like the girl they see in photos, they don’t like me. He kept trying to cover up my history, my experiences, my scars, only creating more. All the battle wounds in the past chapters of my book, turned me into the girl he had gotten to know – the girl he had met on the first night. I wasn’t the perfect girl he was looking for - the girl he wanted that didn’t come from a broken family like his. He wanted someone with a perfect family, the one he had been missing his entire life growing up. I mean, he could have embraced my scars, since he knew them so well, as they represented humanity, love, loss, and rebirth. It could’ve been a chance to help them heal. But he didn’t do that. Yes, we all wear masks, but it's the ones we choose to wear that make a difference in other people’s lives. I mean being a jerk is an intimidation factor, he wasn’t a lawyer, so he was obviously overcompensating for whatever reason he had been hurt. The mask that he wears now, protects him from being embarrassed, hurt or rejected again. His mask is covering someone who is lonely, scared, and fearful. While he continued to pick from the array of masks that he had, never deciding to wear nothing at all, never leaving himself completely vulnerable, he put up this facade. Sometimes, we wear our mask for too long, forgetting that we even had it on. One day he will look at a mirror and realize that he doesn’t know the person who is staring back at him. He will learn that the mask he had worn for so long had become his true face, and the one underneath that – that he had been too afraid to show to the world, had become his true disguise. The mask covered his face and the artificial voice box warped what he was saying. I fell in love with a mask and even after that mask was removed, I hung on to the possibility of him wearing that face once more. I wish we could go back to the day we met, before he got comfortable and took off his shoes, along with the mask.