Makes Cynts: On Masking

“Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.” –Audre Lorde

Retracting my hand from the mailbox I noted the movie Across the Universe, my next Netflix film. Reacting with blah, I realized, as does happen with Netflix, that at some point I’d wanted to see this movie. I queued it. But now I was ambivalent, even felt foolish, sitting to watch this musical, a genre I hadn’t touched since memorizing Little Shop of Horrors in grade school. The characters spat silly and light-hearted lines, pinings for unrequited love, and naïve anger at me, and it clung, was itchy. So much blatant emotion.

Involuntary, muffled barks from me: Of course. It’s a musical. People don’t talk like that for real. Lost inhibition and vulnerability are difficult for me to watch, let alone partake of. I realize my initial reaction to the movie echoes a practice in which I regularly engage: masking. What I mean by that is, while I live a content life, it is protected by a shell, something of a brilliant husk. I am capable of empathizing with others’ complexities, recognizing their actions, words in context of their realities, but unable to reconcile my own contradictions.

Photo from http://lsimpsonstudio.com/

Reluctant to share with others what I have not completely come to terms with—compassions and dismissions, delusions and pipe dreams, anxieties and vanities, fears, bad habits, spitefulness, jealousies (whenever any one of these members feels they need air)—I assume the mask. At conferences it may manifest as the mask of Engaging Networker, socially the Flirty or Keen Small Talker. I initiate or join vibrant discussions on life philosophies, emit guttural laughs, enjoy others’ company. These activities, handled distantly, include little about “letting people in” or expressing vulnerability, certainly not silly pinings or unabashed emotion. My offering comes across as Here presented are my good parts. Let’s keep to these.

Eventually, watching Across the Universe, I was involved, amused, singing, crying by the scene of my favorite Beatles song, “Hey Jude.” Musicals are marvelous, emotion-filled Ferris wheels of suspended reality. I had tickets for 2 hours. But what of our real lives, these masks under which we conceal what directors let freely twirl and crash and romp in the world of musicals? Dangerous in the extremes, these emotional mysteries we build around ourselves, I believe, may benefit others and us.

About the past there is only so much we need to remember in an everyday consciousness—that is, the hurts and failures—only so much we want others to know. In order to keep us operating. From holding grudges like whiny teenagers. From being the pent-up fist-mouthed women and men we could be. We create persons our yesterday selves can be proud of and feel true to. Is this the same as masking? Is it evolving? Is it “being an adult”? Because we contain so much experience and contradictions, shells become a necessity—if you will, armors with advertisements: If you’d like more, inquire inside. Disclaimer: absolutely unperfected.

What do you think? Does masking hold advantages or disadvantages for you?