Yup. I’m going to talk about the death of Robin Williams again tonight.

First, we will get this out of the way :

That song speaks to me. Smokey is not the same sort of clown I am, but the basic feeling is pretty much the same.

I have heard that on the day when Robin killed himself, his wife had no idea anything was wrong. This does not surprise me in the slightest, because he was exactly the sort of person who would find it hard to share his problems with anyone.

Why? Because then he would have to stop being the Robin Williams we all knew and loved. He was addicted to being that person, the funny guy who made everyone laugh and who everyone loved. To admit he had a problem would be to drop that mask, and we clowns wear masks for a reason.

Our masks are the people we want to be. Underneath is the people we are. It is no surprise, then, that we prefer to keep the mask on and just keep being that person all the time. It’s so much easier than being who you really are.

I bet he thought of telling someone many times. He thought of telling him about the endless days when you feel like you are nothing and nobody and nobody needs you or even wants you around. Those are the days without warmth, where the delight you usually feel in entertaining others just doesn’t cut it any more because there is something wrong with the man behind the mask.

Something that is probably related to how much you ignore the man behind the mask because he’s so boring and serious and lame. Part of you knows that you really ought to pay more attention to the man behind the mask, but you just keep putting it off in favour of being the fun, funny, wacky version of your self that spreads joy and happiness wherever he goes.

So you carry on pretending the mask is the real you, while you rot away inside.

And it’s true that the mask is also a form of protection. If people don’t have access to the real you, they can’t hurt it. Anything they might say about you is really just about the mask, so who cares?

And that’s fine… as long as you don’t get confused about which is which. And you will get confused if you don’t have somewhere in your life to just be yourself, and the will to let that happen.

And all the time, the real you is crying out for attention and saying “But what about me? Where’s the love for me, the real person? When do I get to connect with people instead of the mask doing it all? When do I get to be as happy as I make other people? When are my needs met?”

But you just shove that voice to the back of your mind in favour of being this other persona of yours.

I know all this because I wear a mask too. In my case, the mask has a name : Fruvous. That’s the character I roleplay as in various Furry environments.

And he is definitely the person (well, fox) I want to be. He is gregarious, friendly, silly, affectionate, very funny, and almost completely without shame, shyness, or social anxiety.

He is an extrovert. He knows lots of people, but none of them all that deeply. He thrives on attention and withers without it. He is me sans issues.

I spend at least an hour a day as him. I have played him so long that doing so requires very little effort. And for the time I am roleplaying as him, I can pretend to be a far happier and more together version of myself.

And even in my own personal life, I find it hard to admit I am not okay. I was not allowed to not be okay in my childhood. I was just supposed to say I was fine so that people could go back to their lives and resume not thinking about me again.

But I wasn’t fine. I had so many problems as a kid. Looking back, I realize I was a very vulnerable and emotionally unstable kid. I really could have used some kind of psychological intervention when I was in elementary school.

And I had nobody to tell about my problems. I tried to tell teachers about the bullying and they just brushed me off. I couldn’t talk to my parents… they were the ones who wanted me to always be okay.

So to this day, I default to saying everything is fine. And the thing is, when you get into that habit, it seduces you into thinking everything really is okay. You internalize the dismissal of your needs and thus it becomes very difficult to take yourself seriously. And so your problems do not seek treatments.

They get brushed aside.

One of the hardest things for me when I first started going to one-on-one therapy was to shut down the mask. To just abandon my usual self-protection persona and be real and serious and direct with my therapist.

And it’s still a struggle. I know there have been times when I have diverted therapy into an intellectual discussion. Or deflected a genuine insight with a joke. It’s a hard habit to break. Being funny and/or interesting is just so much easier and so much more fun than being the real me.

But I drag myself back to the real pretty quickly.

Part of it is empathy. When you are very empathic, you don’t want to upset people or hurt them because that hurt immediately comes back at you on the empathic channel. You feel their pain, as well as the guilt for having caused it.

That makes it hard to stick up for yourself, and easy to put others’ needs above your own. Their needs seem so much more important to you.

So anyhow, I think I know a little of what Robin went through. I have felt cold and alone and miserable and I too have been the person nobody knows is sad at all, let alone feeling like a massive shadow is consuming them in darkness.

I bet that poor man felt like there was nobody he could talk to, and that there was only one way out of his pain.

I am still mad at him for committing such an act of violence on his loved ones.

But I understand, Robin. I understand.

That’s all from me today, folks. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.