How Well Do We Really Know Each Other?

Meeting new people and making new friends is weird. Society's pressure to "fit in" requires that we do what other people do, laugh at their jokes, make our own, talk to people, and maybe get to know them. Fitting in requires either finding people who are like you, or adapting to the status quo of social paradigms. That, or spend your days alone.

Those are the options, right?

What if I told you that, for the past six weeks, I've worn my passions on my clothes? What if I told you that, despite not knowing a single person in my Masters course, I wore t-shirts with Final Fantasy VII characters, Guardians of the Galaxy references, and Harry Potter icons on them? For all I knew, I could have immediately alienated myself from the class group.

The big question still remains: have I been myself? While I've been unironically enthusiastic about a lot of different things that aren't exactly "normal" (a word that loses all meaning when personal expression is the aim), and while I've exposed a lot about myself to my classmates, I certainly haven't been myself, not 100% of the way.

This is no reflection on them. I don't feel like I can't be myself around them. I don't think they would think any less of me if I showed my full palette of colours. However, like everyone else with an insecurity issue or two, it's not always a matter of whether the other people will accept me. The problem isn't that I can't be myself, in the sense that I would be in intimate, private situations, but that, maybe, I shouldn't be myself.

My reasoning is simple, maybe to its detriment: emotional baggage.

My formative years weren't the best for developing social skills. I take jokes slightly too far. I don't always read people correctly. I have trouble shutting up. These consequences of my youth - say, age 12-15, give or take - are obvious after spending a bit of time with me. But the reason why things turned out that way, that remains a secret except to those who probably don't realise the lasting effect those years have had on my life.

I certainly haven't spoken at length about those years with the majority of the people in my life. This isn't a trust issue, except maybe in the sense that I don't trust myself not to dump every modicum of emotional baggage I carry on those who don't know how to deal with it. Put simply, I don't think I can volunteer that information to anyone any more.

And just by that decision, I'm hiding part of myself. But the fact is, if I felt like I could trust someone, and if they really wanted to know, and if I could feel it from them that they wanted to know for more reasons that sheer curiosity.

I hide my secrets under masks, masks carved from personal truths. I wear masks that say I'm a nerd, that say I like to bake, that say I like to stay on top of college work and the little intricacies of information that fly about in emails. I wear masks that tell people who I want to be when I'm in public, to hide the person I don't like to be, the person who panics, who stresses out, who succumbs to fear and doubt and dread.

The evidence has been made clearer to me over the past six weeks than ever before that I'm not the only person who does this. We all hide things about ourselves, little interests, stories from our pasts we don't share, opinions on the world around us. Everyone does it, because there's a prevailing fear of the intimacy of personal knowledge about other people, and letting them know more about us than we care to admit.

Bad jokes, nerdy t-shirts, enthusiasm, anger, curiosity, baking; these are the masks I wear, to hide the rest of what makes me up. It's all true, it's just not the full truth.

Any friends or family who may end up reading this, here's the thing: the next time you see me, if it really matters for you to know something about me, just ask. The thing about masks is that eventually, they have to come off.

Masks

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about masks (which can be read here), and while I was perfectly happy with it, it didn't entirely sum up every thought in my head in the way that I wanted it to. I'm not one for changing blog posts unless they mention something that someone might not want said, so naturally I've kept it as it was first written, following a dinner with one of my very best friends during the summer. (The dinner was fine and had nothing to do with the masks).

And a few years ago, I wrote an imperfect story about a boy who wears masks all the time, until he loses his physical face in a fire and is forced to wear one all the time (sort of V for Vendetta stuff, now that I reflect on it, though I'm not sure I saw the movie before I wrote the story.) This story was meant to show the universality of the need to wear masks. It did not.

However, earlier today in college we received a version of Charles Finn's Please Hear What I Am Not Saying. The piece got to me, so I went to find a link to it... only to find the original version on a website set up by Finn's wife. This poem does full justice to my mask theory, and I wonder if maybe I read one of the many versions of it in circulation, many years ago.

I encourage you to read the poem (by clicking here). It's such a lovely piece and it does what I never could - it presents the theory, the truth, about masks, but it does so very simply. Here's my public thank you to Mr Finn for writing this wonderful poem. Kudos to you, sir!

Shelters and Masks

There are things we take for granted in this world, and things we don’t notice. Shelters and masks, in that order. This may seem a little bit sudden, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot more of late. The house I live in, it drives me crazy. Sometimes all I want to do is scream and leave, and not come back. Except I’d have to. I have nowhere to go and nothing to go in.

As I walk the streets of Dublin, I’m forced to see the people I don’t want to see: the homeless. I understand that they’re not all drug-addicted excuses for humans or alcoholics or whatever, and that a lot of them are probably only there because of a mistake they’ve made in their past, and as I think about them, I realise they don’t have the liberty of just running away. They don’t have a shelter over their head to trap in the screams they let out, and they don’t have a door to slam after them as they walk to nowhere in particular in a huff. The homeless of Dublin, like the homeless of everywhere else, seem to be trapped in the endless cycle of asking people for change and barely getting enough to feed themselves, let alone to move on somewhere nice, to get to a hostel or to get off the streets. That would take a while, I think, to get enough to get off the streets.

I thought about the harsh winter we had. I didn’t see so many of the usual homeless of Dublin after that, and it made me worry for them. They don’t have a shelter over their head to keep out the cold and the damp and the illness, and they don’t have a door to closed to keep the heat in as they wrap up nice and warm before the fire watching whatever’s on television. The homeless of Dublin, like the homeless of everywhere else, are subject to this world, stuck in the endless cycle of winter, spring, summer and autumn.

Then there’s the rest of us. The ones who’ve see the homeless for a long time and done nothing about it, and who sometimes really don’t have the money to spare to give away, and who rarely feel like the money will go to much good. That might sound harsh, but a guy asked me for money earlier today to go to California. Then he said, “I won’t lie to you, it’s for drink.” My friends’ drinking habits I don’t mind occasionally feeding. They have somewhere to go afterwards. A homeless guy is doing himself no favours by drinking, because 1. it just drives people away from him, 2. the effects of alcohol aren’t permanent, so any warmth he may think he feels is only a temporary illusion and 3. he has nowhere to go when he’s done drinking, because he’s spent all the money he could have used for shelter.

The rest of us see people like this and we wear a mask.

Masks are interesting, though. Masks aren’t just for the homeless. Masks are worn by us all every day to hide how we really feel. That pain we’re feeling... we say it’s about one thing, which can be the perfect truth, but it could also be about another. Or we could hide it altogether behind a smile and a laugh.

I find a reason for a mask a lot of the time, though you won’t always see it on my face. I go into hiding behind my laptop, writing things I don’t want people to hear come from my mouth, to see on my face, to know, for sure, that it’s what I feel. I write my deepest darkest secrets down and cloud them with fiction so that they don’t appear to be anything more than the troubles of any of my characters. So where’s the big secret in that? That’s not hiding. Except there are problems – real and fictional – that aren’t my own, too. Everything about me is hidden in plain sight, but whether you recognise it as truth or fiction, and as my truth or someone else’s, is a different matter altogether.

Masks. Never. Fail.

I’ve been wearing them for... must be five and a half years, now. Five and a half years of being someone else, of smiling when I really had a problem – and when I didn’t, of course, or the mask would be obvious – and of pretending there was nothing killing me on the inside, no nightmares haunting my days and my nights.

Take off the mask and what happens?

People ask questions. People wonder. Worry, concern, anxiety. The smiling boy is frowning. Then, as quickly as they noticed, the mask is back on. It slipped off, just for a wee bit. It got uncomfortable. It got hot and clammy, stuck on so tight to the face of the smiling boy that he had to take it off.

People forget they noticed anything was wrong. They choose to forget, because masks are sometimes easier to look at. A perfectly constructed mask is a beautiful thing, covering up ugly truths. Masks even cover words. A simple, “Yeah, I’m fine,” suffices to dismantle most concern.

Everyone wears masks. The homeless do, too. They’d be crying most of the time, I think, until they couldn’t cry anymore, if they didn’t wear a mask. The problem, of course, is that tears get sympathy but earn trouble, too. Someone who doesn’t seem strong enough to survive may convince himself of that fact. And on the forgiving streets, a mask could keep you alive. Lying to yourself could keep you alive.

We don’t all have shelters, I know. We don’t all have one to escape, or one to protect us. But we all have our masks. We are all a silent mystery wishing never to be solved, hiding truths behind eternal yet fragile masks.