What are you dressing up as tonight? A vampire? Frankenstein? A devil?
Ever thought of going as yourself?
No, I’m not repeating that lame elementary school joke. I’m making a shrewd observation. Every day, we wake up, walk to class, talk to our professors, hang out with friends. Every day, we don our masks. We present the public with what we view as an “acceptable” image.
You know, that personality you think everyone will (maybe) love, admire and respect. We hide our true selves thinking them too hideous for people to see. When we surround ourselves with people we feel (or think we feel) comfortable with, we think we can just take our masks off and relax. But how many of us do?
How many of us can?
Too often we tell ourselves the masks we wear are easy to remove, easy to keep separate from our “true” selves. But we treat these fake personas as appropriate (even necessary) costumes for everyday life. If we’re so accustomed to wearing these masks, then how can we possibly divorce the image we present to “outsiders” from what we think is our “true” self? At what point do we become outsiders to ourselves?
Think about it.
What did you do during the college application process? Created a persona for colleges to accept or reject.
What did you do throughout high school? Made sure teachers knew “you”-or the image you wanted them to write a recommendation about.
What about grade school? You bought into every fad from Pokémon to Harry Potter so you could fit in with everyone else.
Slowly but surely, the outside becomes the inside. Slowly but surely, we become strangers to ourselves. While the masks we wear may never consume us whole, the sway they hold over us can be transformative.
At times, we may not even recognize who we are without our disguises. At times, we may not even want to face what we’ve become.
But we continue to wear our masks. We wear them until we forget to take them off when we go out. We wear them until we forget to take them off around our friends. We wear them until we forget to take them off before we go to bed. We wear them until we can’t take them off even if we want to.
What are we afraid of? What lies beneath our layers? Without the slightest notice, we’ve made Halloween a yearlong holiday. Sans the candy. Sans the fun.
But we sure do have plenty of fear.
Wandalyn is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].