At some point, many months ago, I put on a mask. I’m not sure exactly when I put it on. I don’t even know where I got it, and for a really long time I didn’t realize I was wearing it.
This mask covered up everything I had become and tried to turn me back into what I’d been before, even though I wasn’t that person anymore.
This mask, through some cosmic power I didn’t know I had, is invisible. It manifests in a hundred different ways, all of which hide what’s actually beneath it.
The mask is a smile when the person behind it wants to shut her door and cry.
It’s my outward I-can-do-that-attitude when the reality is that there have been days when the logistics of getting from my house to my office seemed like an insurmountable obstacle.
It’s a calm demeanor that hides the tightness in my chest that’s been there so long sometimes I don’t even notice I’m not breathing properly.
It’s the cheerful mama voice – that one that can multitask with the best of them – trying to redirect a frustrated toddler while at the same time calculating how long it is until bedtime and wondering how she got to this place.
I’m a wife and a mother, a daughter and a sister. I’m an employee and a supervisor, a colleague and a friend. The mask pretends this space is hidden, that these words are just for me. It makes me wonder, every day, what those people I know, those people I see every day, will think when they read these words. If they read these words. Because here I am not hiding. Here I can set my mask aside.
Outside this space I haven’t quite managed to take it off. Recently I experimented with taking it off – putting myself out there in a place more people I know might find me – but for the most part I still wear it. It reappeared in full force this week, covering up a wave of reality I didn’t see coming.
For a long time, this mask has defined me. I have to have faith one day that won’t be the case anymore.
This post is linked up with The Red Dress Club’s memoir prompts.
