masks (in the figurative sense)
I've always had something of a nebulous self-concept.1 We all wear many masks, of course, one for each of the different situations we find ourselves in, protecting our inner selves from the world, but I always have the sense that most people conceive of there being a true self shining through beneath it all, that when we go home at the end of the day we hang them up and there we are, bright and brilliant. This is not how I conceive of myself.
The popular conception of the mask as public persona seems to be that it is at least on some level disingenuous, or at least that it obfuscates the true self; even if the wearing of a mask is not seen as vice, the removal of one is seen as virtue. I can't help but find this idea a little grating. The personas we construct aren't evils, necessary or otherwise; they are an integral part of our beings, something more malleable than our core selves, but nevertheless just as real, just as authentic.
This idea originates, I think, largely from the fact that the mask we are all most likely to be conscious of is our work persona. The work persona feels disingenuous because we live in a capitalist society where the range of acceptable behaviors allowed to wage serfs workers are severely limited; it's broadly understood that service workers are not being friendly because they like you.2 That our society is toxic enough to require this level of self-suppression and emotional labor from its workers does not make it the fault of the workers that they need to develop a specific mask to cope with it. But we also have masks for situations that are not so constrained: masks for friends, masks for family, masks for different individual people. This is normal, healthy behavior; we do, after all, contain multitudes.
And for me, the mask provides a sense of stability. It is shelter from the storm of living, solid ground when terra firma is difficult to find; that I can't conceive of it as some inherent aspect of my self is irrelevant. It is no less true for the fact that it was created; what is art, after all, but a created thing which is true?
There's a reason for a while I had a blog for essays, a blog for microfiction, a blog for media stuff . . . I struggled with finding a place to consolidate the many fragmented selves I create. It wasn't until finding Cohost that I felt comfortable just putting them all in one place, and it's that spirit I intend to keep, moving forward.↩
Not that I think this is necessarily or even usually disingenuous, nor that there is no value in these surface-level polite interactions. But capitalism enforces a power imbalance in these interactions, which must always be kept in mind.↩