You are not the mask you wear
Real vs Fake You
“One of the things I love in the Seven Story Mountain by Merton, is that he talks about that we think ourselves are our achievements. We clothe ourselves in our achievements, in order to give the self that we do not know form, so that we might seem to be something or someone to the world.” - Stephen Colbert
We’ve all had those moments. We put on a cover, act differently, in order to win over someone. Whether for a job, a first date, or just our online persona.
But it’s not you.
Not at your truest. In order to survive and get through he world, something about it is constructed. The “fake it ‘till you make it” is second nature to us, especially in America. “Success” depends upon it. You can’t show any weakness, or else they might not take the deal, buy the product, or end in a transaction.
Authenticity is dangerous to the bottom line.
So, we clothe ourselves in a fakeness to smooth over any problems and secure our livelihood. It’s all well and good...except it’s a lie.
We are not just our presentation, not fully at least. We intentionally withhold our whole selves (at least most of us…present included). Life is too important, we think, to endanger our odds. Better to keep your opinions to ourselves, make the money, and move on. You’d be foolish to jeopardize your life by being genuine, no?
But what are we losing by not being true to who we are? At some point, this game of putting on a mask becomes real to us, as if we are the adjectives that describe us.
Yet, we are not our masks…
We come into this world as pure beings, but growing up, our childhood egos learn to camouflage our true selves in order to survive in the group. We learn very early that if you’re authentic, it can go against you. We learn to compromise who we are so we can fit in.
But it isn’t living. A mask is a coping strategy. And survival has its place, but by no means is it thriving. The more we live outside of ourselves, and adorn ourselves in false realities, the further we impoverish our truest joy — to live from our deepest selves.
The False Self
“If I never become what I am meant to be, but always remain what I am not, I shall spend eternity contradicting myself by being at once something and nothing, a life that wants to live and is dead, a death that wants to be dead and cannot quite achieve its own death because it still has to exist.”1
True living springs from who we are at our core. When we talk of the innocence of children, this is what we are really getting at—the purity of being our authentic selves.
You can catch glimpses of this true self when it comes out in your deepest joys, or flow states. It cannot hide fully. It’s a lightness of being that carries you.
But this purity is so subtle to see that it feels almost unreal. We feel like we are naked, that we aren’t enough in ourselves. We don’t feel adequate and we need something to make us good enough.
So what do we do?
The false self feels unworthy, so it clings to material things to prove itself. Our egos feel empty so it takes anything/everything and clothes itself in them to be something.
This is one of the meanings behind the Adam and Eve story: both were “naked” and found things to clothe themselves, so they could be, instead of be naked, before the void of eternity.
Our fig leaves today are a little more advanced: money, titles, fame. They can also be deceptive too: our gifts, skills, or our unique personalities. Anything we put our identity in that isn’t fully us.
The True Self
Because the authentic you is hidden and feels inadequate, it finds “real” things to prove its value and significance. But as the soul knows, there is nothing real to these things, the fig leaves of our own making. You are not your status. You are not your possessions. Even the wealthy are some of the most unhappy people — just ask most ultra rich.
“We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag” as Momma Ru says. We learn as children to conform, and act in ways that aren’t always authentic, in order to survive. It’s not entirely bad — our ego is just trying to help us.
But it isn’t “real.” It’s not who we truly are, at our deepest selves.
There is no one thing you can do, have, or achieve to make yourself into something. Like Adam and Eve, fig leaves cannot mask our nakedness. The true aim of life isn’t achievement, but finding who we truly are.
“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and discovering my true self...”2
You’ve not begun to live until you’ve realized the mask you’re wearing isn’t you. Only in being can you begin to tap into an endless well of joy found only in who you truly are. It is the ultimate treasure:
“This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”3
Until you see that you are not the material things in your life, but something deeper and far more profound, you aren’t living. Life doesn’t really begin until you realize that you are not your adjectives, you are not your successes or your failures. You are so much more.
Being
In the preface to the latest edition of Man’s Search for Meaning there’s a story of a Nazi officer inspecting the citizens of a small town in World World II. He asks for the credentials of a well-to-do, upper-middle-class person, and when the prominent person hands over his documents, the Nazi asks “is that everything you have?” The man nods. “Then the Nazi throws it all in the wastebasket and tells him ‘Good, now you have nothing.’”
If we are only what we can do or have, we are deluding ourselves. At some point life will show us, either in heartache or at the end of life, that we are not those things. They are gifts we came with OR things we earned along the way…but they are not our soul. We are far more.
Don’t lock your identity into any finite things…you risk losing yourself.
But more than that, you were never just those things. Life is so much more.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Chapter 5, Things in Their Identity.
Ditto ;)
Ditto, Ditto :)