Chapter Two — The Masks We Wear
“The persona is [...] a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.” -Carl Jung
I put on my first mask in the fall of 1992.
I was barely 14 years old and had just been transported across the country—from Toler, Kentucky to Olympia, Washington—against my will to begin my high school journey in a place where I knew absolutely no one. During this slow-motion trauma-in-progress, I found myself for the first time unsure of where I fit in the grand scheme of things. Back home, I had found my niche. I was a weird, poor kid… but I was also really smart and my brain was going to be my ticket to getting out of poverty.
I had just met Shawna, the first girl in my life who really made me feel something deep inside. We had been out on an honest-to-goodness date at the movies and I was really starting to believe that I might truly be able to connect with someone… at least as much as a teenage boy can.
But all that was taken away from me in a heartbeat… and suddenly I was in an unfamiliar place surrounded by unfamiliar people, while having the kind of home life that would have made the Myers family in the Rob Zombie Halloween films look like the Cleavers. Going to school and feeling alone was preferable to coming alone and being confronted with the realization that I actually was alone… and that nobody was coming to help me.
Those things shook my belief in who I was and shattered my sense of belonging to the world around me.
But somewhere along the way, I decided that if I couldn’t be sure about who I was and where I fit, that I could simply be whoever I wanted.
So I put on a mask.
As masks go, it wasn’t a particularly good one. I tried to convince the new people at my very white, very upper-middle-class high school that I was a person of importance in my former hometown. I made up wild stories about the “Kentucky Hood” and overinflated my athletic accomplishments—meaning I suggested that I had any athletic accomplishments at all… when I, in fact, did not.
When I tried to play sports, that fact became painstakingly clear to anyone paying attention.
Even with my mask, though, I still admire 14-year-old me’s desire to survive and try to fit in. There was this place call the “social corner” that was the intersection of the main hallways at my high school that freshman year. I just started showing up there in the mornings and trying to meet people. Connect. Even if it was through wild stories and lame character moments, I still refused to just sit and isolate when I was thrust into a situation that was really terrible for me. I could have just been a loner that first year, but I really, really tried to make it work in the only way I could figure out how.
Yeah. It was a shitty coping mechanism, but there are still people I know from that freshman year. One of the best friends I’ve ever had in life, Andrew, is still a good friend and I was in his wedding. Ironically, Andrew is the one friend I earned by being myself… which I think is a telling lesson of its own.
But that wasn’t the last mask I would ever put on. Not by a longshot.
After my first year of high school, which was nighmarish at home, I was forced to move again because my mother didn’t want to make a 30 minute commute to work each day. I find that to be hilarious now, because she commutes at least 30 minutes or more to work every day in her current job. It’s funny how it wasn’t worth it to her then in order to help provide me with some much needed stability, but it’s totally fine now.
But I digress…
I found myself once again in a brand new school and having to make brand new friends. I didn’t have it in me to wedge myself into the popular crowd again the way I had done at my previous school. So I was kind of a loner. A couple of the band and choir guys let me sit with them at lunch, but nobody really wanted to be my friend. Well. Not until I started playing recreational league basketball for Fort Lewis, which is where we lived now.
You gotta understand something. I grew up in rural Kentucky. Basketball is in our blood. It’s our birthright. We’re as fanatical about basketball as Europeans are about soccer. So no matter what, I was going to be playing basketball somewhere, even if I didn’t know a single soul on the team. And boy howdy, I sure didn’t.
That’s because almost all the dudes on the league team were black, and I didn’t have a lot of experience around different types of people coming from the background that I grew up in. But even then, I wasn’t racist or anything—not beyond the cultural racism that’s baked in to our Americans lives, anyway—I just didn’t know how to relate. So I didn’t naturally gravitate toward the black kids.
But somehow they all let me bond with them over basketball, because I loved it just as much as they did. We would talk about college and the NBA. Our rec league team went undefeated and won the championship. It was one of the best times of my life.
But even then, I slowly started putting on a mask. I tried to appropriate a lot of their culture. I changed the way I talked to sound more urban. I started sagging my jeans and listening to gangster rap. I still love Dre and Snoop, but they are not the music that I usually identify with. I wanted to feel like a part of the group so badly, however, that I started to turn myself into them.
They knew it, of course… they never made me feel bad for it. They would roll their eyes at this dumbfuck white kid trying to act black, but there was always a seat at the domino table and in the spades game—mostly because I was really fucking good at those games, but also because they just wanted to make a place for me.
That’s why racial issues matter to me so much. I don’t look at black people like they are different than me. They are my people too. My brothers. My sisters. They took me in when nobody else would. They made me feel like I had a place to belong and that people cared about me when I was experiencing anything but that in my home every day. I don’t know what would have happened to me if those kids—Curtis, Garland, Wilmer, Zakee, etc.—hadn’t been willing to just be my friend.
And yet, I still felt the need to wear that mask around them.
Maybe that means that our masks have less to do with how the people around us are treating us and more to do with our ability (or inability) to present our authentic selves to the world. That’s certainly been the case for me anyway.
I’ve worn mask after mask in my 45 years on this earth. I’ve tried to be so many different kids of people for so many different kids of reasons. I guess maybe some people are able to keep their masks on for a long time, but I always find that mine grow too suffocating if kept on for too long. Of course, instead of just taking them off for good, I too often felt the solution was simply trying to find a mask that would let me breathe more easily.
Those don’t exist, by the way.
Ultimately, I think I was trying to hide from myself. I’ve been afraid to embrace the totality of who I am, especially The Shape who lurks in the shadows, because I haven’t really known who that person is. I had spent so much time wearing masks that it became a self-sustaining enterprise. I eventually reached a tipping point where I had lived more life under a mask than without one, and it completely ravaged my sense of self.
That’s part of this whole thing for me. I’m trying to explore all these different elements of my nature, and in this case it’s the subconscious. The Shadow. Not only do I have to come to terms with who he is and what he’s meant to me in life, I have to somehow find a way to embrace him and even love him unconditionally, no matter whether or not I actually want these darker parts of me to be true.
They are. For everyone. And we only cause ourselves more trouble when we don’t confront and deal with those things in healthy ways. This is the Jungian path and it’s the only one I’ve ever walked that’s made any sense.
So for me, one of the first ways to commit to living a life without masks is to admit how much I’ve loved wearing them.
But they don’t fit anymore… and truly never have at all.