You’re young. Got choices to make. Choose classes to take, jobs to work, places to live and with whom, roles to play, masks to wear. You try on a mask or two. Before long, the fit feels right. Must be the one for me, you think. Few cynics start young, so the thought does not arise that the mask was a cast and you were soft clay.
“Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.” – Somerset Maugham
Years pass, wakes up the cynic within. Why wear a mask? Why this one? What would it be like without? Or with another one on? But the clay has long since hardened. You and the mask are fused into one, it seems.
“We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.” – André Berthiaume
You work up the nerve to unmask. They protest. Turns out your mask is part of them too. They’ve come to depend on you in your mask, and can’t accept the change. Even happens in rock ‘n’ roll, where you’d think anything goes. The KISS unmasked after a decade of wild concerts. A lukewarm decade later, they re-masked and went on to sell out stadiums once again, to fans who insisted that old masks be kept on.
“Horror is the removal of masks.” – Robert Bloch
Perhaps so. But it’s a horror that beckons, dares you to try it, and keeps you in suspense. Would unmasking liberate? Or wipe me out?
A powerful post, Jim. Before masks it was figurative; now it's both. That it's true others would rather our masks; wow.
Very nice, Jim! I've always liked this one - "Behind the mask - it's a whole 'nother world." - Anon.