Masks

And once again, for the second time this year, the veil between the worlds grows thin, electricity fills the air, and not everything is as it seems. It must be Halloween.

I’m sure that law enforcement officials are thrilled beyond belief that the holiday is a Friday this year; so many more opportunities for overwrought frat boys and girls to act out in public than there would be if Halloween were any other day but Saturday. The Washington Post reports that the DC area is looking forward to its first Halloween in two years. This same article also stated:

“Halloween is the one time of the year when grown-ups get to play,” Casidine said. “There’s no meal to be prepared. There’s no religious connotations. It’s really an adult holiday.”

Of course adults like Halloween. We’re trained to as children, for one thing. For another thing, it allows us to put on a mask we might not normally wear and to play with an identity that at another time might be to scary for us to indulge. In some cases, it allows us to take off a mask we have to wear to get through everyday life. It saddens and frightens me, though, that we’ve lost the connection to exactly why we wear masks at all on Halloween.

Halloween, or Samhain, is one of the two times of the year that the barriers between the world of the living and the world of the dead thin. The point of Halloween masks was to disguise your real face from spirits that might be seeking vengeance. The whole concept has me going back to pondering identity, how we define ourselves, but, more importantly, what it is we show to others.

The face I show at work isn’t the same one I show at home. The one I show to my mother isn’t the same one I show to my best friend. And I certainly don’t show the same face to people I interact online that I do to people I know in “Real Life.” While they are all parts or aspects of me, none of them is the whole.

In some ways, what appears electronically, here and in other places, is the best of me; the distillation of who I would like to be able to be in person. Some of that may be because I live my life in my head and possess more than a modicum of intellectual vanity. I’m smart, I know I’m smart, and I’m not shy about it. Since looks and all those other things on which people make value judgments (ethnicity, stature, weight, gender, age, and a myriad other things) don’t matter on the page, I get to be who I want to be, not who I am. In many ways, who I am online is more genuine than who I am in person. And that genuine quality is what is missing from most adults.

We take on roles as we grow older, put on different masks. In some ways, I think this is why people have children; to recapture that simple joy of being able to say exactly what you think. But are we more flexible as children?

Think about it for a minute…being an adult is, in many respects, about tact. It’s about being able to answer the “does this make me look fat?” question from your best friend in a way that, even though you both know she needs to lose 15 pounds (and you both know that you both know), doesn’t make her feel like you’re saying “Of course it makes you look fat, you big cow! You need to lose 15 pounds!” A child will have no qualms about telling another her true opinion about something, flat out, bald faced. While this may result in hurt feelings, or even tears, two hours later the same two children will be playing happily together as if those tears were never shed.

And can we ever really perceive the whole truth about ourselves? Or is the truth of someone a combination of self-perception, presentation, society’s expectations, and the perception of others?

No answers, not yet. Yet another memo from The Thoughts That Come Unbidden Department.