Masks

(crossposted from Facebook)

(This is not about you, unless it is.)

You go through your life vaguely numb and disconnected or vaguely afraid and anxious about everything. Other people are a source of judgment and shame and you reflexively avoid putting yourself in situations or doing things where you might open yourself up to that judgment. Instead you slowly perfect a mask that allows you to interact safely, to get through the day without anything too bad happening.

Then you meet someone.

You catch each other’s eyes from across the room. You look at each other. Something inside you melts, and you come into contact with something that feels powerfully human – deep and ancient and beautiful, light as a feather, bright as the sun. You yearn for this. It feels right in a way that nothing else in your life does. You drop your mask, a little. And for a time, things are not so bad.

Then it starts to go wrong. One of you says or does something, and it touches a wound in the other. You both have so many wounds. You may not even know about the most important ones. It hurts so much to look at them that you desperately pretend to each other that they aren’t there. You apologize, you say it didn’t matter and you were just being silly, you attempt to move on. You can keep this up for weeks or months or years if that’s what it takes. Your masks calcify.

But you can’t keep this up forever. One day your mask breaks. It all comes pouring out – all of your pain, all of your anger. They hurt too, and they respond in kind. What is most poignant about this moment is that your hearts, wounds and all, have never been closer to the surface – they are so close they could almost touch. In some sense you are never more human than in this moment. But you can’t see this about each other through the pain.

All you see is a monster, finally unmasked.