Been thinking about my social mask lately.

Actually, calling it a mask is a vast oversimplification. If that is all it was, nobody would ever ask the question “But which one is the real me?”. You’re the person wearing the mask. End of story.

But it’s a lot more complicated than that. It would be facile to pretend like that mask is not part of our true self. It might be different than what it hides, but it’s still a part of us, just as our skin is a part of us even though it’s different from what it protects.

And even our social masks reveal who we really are. We don’t create them entirely from scratch. They come from parts of us we have discovered it is safe to express. Our social mask might not, in some sense, be our “true selves”, but it is made from the same stuff. One cannot simply doff one social mask a don another’s. They are custom fit.

I used to fool myself into thinking that, unlike others, my open and honest self did not have a social mask. But that’s ludicrous. Not only do I have one, it’s one that confines me quite strenuously, and the very notion of dropping it scares the shit out of me.

Not literally. I mean, come on.

The mask is easy to define, because it’s the person most people think I really am. That cheerful, funny, happy go lucky fellow with the brilliant mind and the clever jokes and the goofy sense of humour. The fellow who can be very charming and who has a big presence and a a great deal of warmth.

And I love that guy. But it’s not the real me. I wish it was, I really do. I wish it so hard that sometimes I actually believe it. But the real me has a lot more complexity and depth and nuance. And, most importantly, it has things which do not fit that persona at all, and because I would rather be that guy than the real me, that means I have heavily suppressed the parts of me that don’t fit the picture. And it’s only been within the last few months that I have been uncovering the real me and trying to accept the parts of me that I would rather not have and have pretended didn’t exist for years.

For one thing, I have a quick temper. That’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s undoubtedly true. I can go from calm and mellow and groovy to very angry in a heartbeat. For years, this fact was obscured by the draining effects of depression and my utter inability to express my anger or even confront it.

But there is no doubt about it, I have a quick and potentially volatile temper. It’s hasn’t become a problem yet because I still suppress myself pretty fucking hard. But I am working to pry my fingers from that override switch and let myself feel things and even, sometimes, to express and act on those feelings, even if it makes things messy, complicated, are hard to control.

Fuck control, man. Too much self control can kill you. You have to give yourself room to breathe. Room to live. Room to just be you, instead of the person you are trying to be. The person you think you should be. The person under the mask.

Another thing I only recently figured out about myself : I’m actually kinda hyper. Depression hid that too, but my period of studying the phonetic alphabet intensively really opened my eyes to how much activity I need in order to be happy. When I had the phonetics to focus upon, I wasn’t exactly blissed out. In fact, I was somewhat stressed and not having a ton of fun.

But then I woke up Wednesday morning and realized that I had to go back to not knowing what to do with myself again, and that was really depressing. I found myself wondering how it was that I could live that way for so long. Directionless, diffuse, and distracted. Having to work so hard on learning the phonetic alphabet gave me a glimpse into what life might be like if I really applied myself.

So it’s not that I was really happy doing it. I was just a lot less miserable.

But I know I won’t go from layabout to busy bee overnight. I still suffer from a large dose of paralysis of the will, and that will take a long time to overcome. The self-sedation I have mentioned before will be one hell of an addiction to overcome.

Take this weekend. It’s gonna be a very busy weekend for me. I have FRED tonight and the BCSFA meeting tomorrow night. Then back to school Monday. To my introverted self, that makes it seem like I am not really getting a weekend. Too much socializing! Social batteries draining! Surely I will die!

I’m exaggerating,but that is truly how it feels. And the thing is, there is some truth to it…. but not much. I will be fine.

It’s the addiction to retreating to my safe space that makes me think otherwise. The constant availability of the escape into my distractions (and, when even that becomes too much, into sleep) has led me to become addicted to it, and to consequently feel like if I stay away from my little womb/tomb here for too long, something terrible will happen.

But I know it won’t. Tonight I will have a nice dinner with friends, then come home. Tomorrow night I will go hang out with a lot of the same people. I will have plenty of “me” time in between, and being far away from my retreats will not kill me.

In fact, the most likely result is some positive social input, and that’s good medicine for a sad little critter like me.

There’s probably a lot more aspects of myself I need to unearth and express, but I made a good start today.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.