Unmasking.

"We create a mask to meet the masks of others. Then we wonder why we cannot love, and why we feel so alone."  - Eshin

I first came across this quote years ago while reading Zen and the Art of Falling in Love  by Brenda Shoshanna.


I was 23, and going through the heartbreak of holding onto a relationship that didn't fit, in order to prove something about myself - that I was lovable, could earn love through fixing him and being a person without needs or pain of my own in need of attention.


I pretended a lot. Acted calm when I was furious, pretended to understand and embrace things I totally opposed, in order to keep this person somewhat near me. Because they were my talisman and proof that I could be normal, could be in a relationship with a boy and keep it going.


Despite my pretending, or maybe because of it, maybe because I seemed fine no matter what he did, he was absent a lot, would disappear. It was the opposite of what my mask was supposed to earn for me-his presence! So my best friend at the time offered this book as a balm, and introduced me to the possibility that I was keeping myself from the love I wanted, because of fear.


I think I got it, in terms of that relationship (which needed to end), but it went over my head in terms of...every other relationship in my life lol (relationships that can't be avoided or ended).





Via XVIIIZZ on Unsplash

I've worn masks forever and ever, with family especially.


 Act emotionless when you want to crumble because Dad and everyone says you're too sensitive and need a thicker skin. Pretend to have an ordinary relationship with him despite the years of anger and fear over his physical and psychological abuse of the family. Just get over the things you aren't over, or pretend to be. Nobody got time for that. Family is family. This is what love looks like, here.


With the September workshop I attended with Zelda Lockhart on healing our primary wounds in order to find home inside and outside ourselves, and the year long fall out over getting too real with the same friend who I once relished not having to wear a mask around, I'm getting more real with myself about the masks I've made almost part of me. Like, it's automatic. But it is also costly. As I long for community, and make efforts to build it, I feel the discomfort of having to come out from behind the mask in order to recognized as kin by my would-be community.

"Throughout our lives we all play a variety of games. We help others keep their pretenses up and they help us keep ours. In one way this makes us feel safe and secure. In another it robs our true life, and allows us to live in a make-believe world where we become cardboard people, basically unreal. If someone knocks on our door to visit, there is no one home." -Brenda Shoshanna, Zen and the Art of Falling in Love, 212-213.

 I want to be home when people come to meet me. I don't want to disappear, poof, disassociate, the way I can when fear tells me I'll be rejected if I show myself.


Part of getting into the practice of showing up with all my stuff, is now attending Al-Anon meetings for families of addicts. It is real medicine, listening to people talk about things that were once the most shameful and hidden things in their lives, and laugh about them, or share how they're working with their difficult emotions, and seeing how it is embraced. How no one gets up and walks away, or says "That didn't happen" or "Get over it" or anything else invalidating. People just are where they are. It's helping me to be where I am, not gloss over it and skip to the lessons but to say...man. I am really in the thick of this thing. Unmasking.