Masks of Me

For much of my life, every time I let me out to play, work, or live, something went wrong. Someone would hurt me, or I would hurt someone. I’d lose a friend. I would disappoint someone. I’d see that look of judgment. Mostly though I ended up feeling like I didn't belong, that I didn't fit in, that something was wrong with me. I would then retreat behind my mask and secure it in place.

I was reminded of how prevalent my mask has been in my life recently while reading Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle. She describes her representative in much the same way I've often described putting on my mask for the world. Her descriptions of her reactions to expectations and conformity lined up far more with my experience than I want to acknowledge. I squirmed in my seat every time she referred to her representative. In fact, I kept wanting to change the word representative to mask because it lined up so well with my experience with my mask. I was drawn back to Glennon's description of her representative and to the problems caused to our physical, mental, and emotional health when we live behind a representative or a mask in attempts to live to expectations that don’t match who we are inside.

My mask both lead to betrayals and helped me to survive some of those betrayals. My mask cheated me out of some experiences because I was afraid to remove it and be myself. My mask served me in a million different ways and hurt me in a million different ways.

According to my mom, I came home from kindergarten sometime in the first few days and said, "There's a bunch of little kids over there." Looking back, I think I was trying to tell her I didn't feel like I belonged, but I didn't know how. I didn’t even know to call what I felt a sense of not belonging. I spent all of elementary and high school trying to figure out what would make me feel like I belonged. 

Even when I had friends and slumber parties and birthday parties and went to school or church events, I never really felt like I belonged. I learned, for the most part, the right things to say and the right ways to be and mimicked other kids though these interactions felt like playing a game for which no one had given me the rules. My entire life felt like playing one game after the other trying to get it, whatever it was, right. Somewhere along the line I started experimenting with myriad masks to meet expectations, or at least go through the right motions.

I assumed everyone else was also playing games, except I thought they knew the rules that I didn’t know.

I constantly felt like the me inside was going to burst out and expose me. I felt
like at any moment my mask would slip, and I would be in big trouble if anyone saw what was on the inside – my true thoughts and emotions. I was terrified of my own thoughts and emotions, particularly my intense and vivid imagination.

Yet, I somehow managed to put on an acceptable mask that fooled many into believing I was transparent. “She wears her heart on her sleeve.” Little did they know! “She always speaks her mind. She’s so blunt.” If only they knew how often I bit my tongue!

As I read Glennon’s story, I thought about how she and I seemed to go in opposite directions in some ways in our efforts to hide our true selves to be acceptable or as I’ve often put it loveable – to conform, to meet expectations but we both sought ways to numb out our true selves.  I went to the ultimate “good girl” place trying to be acceptable. 

I threw myself into my studies with the goal of being able to leave my hometown to find a place where I truly belonged. I didn’t date. I rarely went out with friends, especially at night. The first time I got drunk I was in college, and I didn’t particularly like it. I never felt tempted to try drugs. If I’m perfectly honest, I feared drugs. But then again, I liked being in control. Alcohol and drugs didn’t feel like control to me. 

I avoided sex until college. My first few encounters were quite boring. I’d expected it to fundamentally change something about me. It didn’t. I was convinced there was something wrong with me, so there came another mask. Eventually, I came to really enjoy sex, but I never quite understood why people connected it to love. Sure, it could be connected to love, but they always felt like somewhat separate things to me.

I struggled with food in a different way than Glennon. I always hated eating. I hated everything about eating. The chewing, the sounds, the texture of food, swallowing, digestion… I hated it all. I didn’t binge and purge, but I often vomited after eating even a small meal. I was diagnosed with what my doctor explained as an “overactive stomach muscle” – whatever that meant (I still don't know.) - and given a tiny bright blue pill (capsule) to take before each meal. (I don’t remember the name of the medication.) I stopped taking it shortly after I started college because I didn’t need it anymore. From that point forward, the vomiting seemed to only show up when I got really upset, felt exposed, or felt like I had no control over what was happening in my life.

I knew this hatred of eating was abnormal, or at least weird. Everyone around me loved eating to, what I considered, disgusting degrees. I still find it absurd that people love food to the degree they do. Food is fuel. Eating is necessary. Yes, it is better when food tastes good than when it doesn’t, but still. Eating isn’t pleasurable. It’s rather gross. I try not to think about it.

And, yet, because I am a ball of contradictions, I love to cook!

I didn’t think I numbed out. I truly didn’t but thinking back I know I did. I felt numb most of the time. Not eating for hours on end can provide a sense of numbness, so I would deny myself food. I tried to self-medicate with alcohol after I was sexually assaulted, but I found it exhausting and rather boring to try to drink that much alcohol on a regular basis. Plus, it made me feel too much before I could get to the numb part. I would stay awake too long and then sleep too long, so I could numb out. I denied myself pleasure to numb out. I worked too much, studied too hard, and played too hard all in an effort to numb out. I wanted to be numb all the time then, so I could quash the feeling of not belonging and pretend like I belonged. In many ways, I felt numb even as outwardly I was expressing all kind of emotions that I didn’t even realize I didn’t really feel until much later. All of that hid the feelings I was truly feeling deep down, especially my sense of not belonging.

Through all of that, the most surprising thing to me was how real my mask started to feel. The approval my mask received intoxicated me. Yet, every time I looked in the mirror, I looked away from my own eyes because there looking back at me was the accusation that I was betraying myself.

When I first started trying to live authentically, it felt as much like a mask as my mask had in the beginning, maybe more so because I was more aware of what I was doing. I didn’t know what to do with that. Facing my vulnerabilities felt like betraying my mask and somehow that translated into betraying myself. I had become more loyal to my masks than to my self.

I started sorting out who I was as much as I feared finding out. Not who my mask represented. Not who my friends wanted me to be. Not who my husband wanted me to be. Not who my family wanted me to be. Not even who I wanted me to be. 

What happened when those masks were in conflict? How quickly could I shift from one mask to the other? When had I developed so many similar but different
masks? And why?

What happened when someone called out a mask they didn’t recognize because these worlds began to overlap, especially on social media?

First, I had to figure out who I was underneath all those expectations to figure out what I liked about me and what I didn’t. I went into this thinking it would be a goal. I could check off a bunch of tasks and waalaa the answer would present itself. I would suddenly know exactly who I was and would be exactly who I wanted to be. Was I ever in for a rude awakening. Nothing works that way.

As I worked through my masks and all the expectations I’d been trying to meet, even the ones I created in my own head, I realized I often wore a mask even when I was alone because it was much easier than facing how hidden I felt, how alone I felt, how unlovable I felt.

I also often used my mask to console myself if someone didn’t like me because I knew deep inside that they only hated the mask they’d met, not the real me. The real me was safe inside sheltered from any hatred that came my way. I could comfort myself with the knowledge that the person who didn’t like me didn’t really know me.

Bits of the masks I wore and my true self had somehow started to weave themselves together. I really wasn’t sure who I was anymore. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to be anymore. I wasn’t sure how to embrace the inner me who had never felt like she belonged anywhere.

All those masks had helped me to fit in in myriad places, but they never erased the feeling that I didn’t quite belong. Looking back, I wonder why I cared so much about belonging even as I worked hard to convince people I didn’t care. I wore that mask very well. Easier to appear not to care than to be vulnerable enough to try to figure out why I felt like I didn’t belong.

Somewhere along the line hurting myself to not make other people uncomfortable became acceptable to me. Little did I know that sacrificing me wouldn’t make me more loveable because those who loved the masked me were cheated out of loving the real me, and I was cheated out of having the real me loved.

If you’d asked me, I’d have told you I held no shame about who I was, but I still hid that person behind a mask. If I wasn’t ashamed, what was I? Maybe I feared my own power. Maybe I feared being “too big for your britches” - I was always afraid of that because those words are engraved on my psyche. 

I had internalized the lessons well. Good little girls know their place, hold their tongues, and downplay their intelligence. Good little girls make other people feel better about themselves even if it costs them themselves. Good little girls protect the image of virtue even when they can’t or choose not to protect virtue itself. And… Good little girls grow up to be good little women who downplay their power, their strength, their intelligence, their sexuality because they are somehow ashamed of being strong, powerful, smart, and sexual - human.

I would’ve denied adopting any and all of the above even as I wore my mask and felt like I was smothering inside it.

As I’ve struggled to break down my various masks, embrace both my vulnerability and my strength, I’ve come to think about who I am on the inside, the me I’ve always been convinced was unlovable even when people who caught glimpses of her despite my best efforts told me otherwise.

I’ve come to accept that my masks are me as much as the masks shields me. It has become a part of who I am because it’s how I interact in situations where I don’t feel safe. Accepting the role my mask plays in my life and in who I am helps me rely on it less and be more authentic. I always feared who I was inside because I internalized the lesson somewhere in my childhood that I was too loud, too outspoken, too much and, yet, not quite enough.

The work of not living behind a mask lead to me realizing that the only real option was to integrate my myriad masks and the self they hid. That work is ongoing and likely will be for the rest of my life. What I came to understand was that I can’t eliminate the masks because they also emanate from somewhere inside me and they often hold elements of my true nature just distilled, cajoled, and dressed up like putting on a suit to give a presentation. At that point, my masks began to crack and allow my authentic self to shine through.

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