The Man Behind The Mask

There is a topic that fascinates me and I have wrote about it before, the idea of having two distinct personalities, one for public and one for private settings.  As a gay man, ever since I was very young I knew I was different, and from that young age I was already acutely aware that some people would react very badly if they knew; to that end, from such a young age I fully understood that I had to present a different personality to the world, than the one that I felt inside.  Over the years I have wondered to what extent this divides gay people, and those of the extended LGBT community and beyond, from those who are straight and for lack of a better word, "conform" to society's expectations.

I believe this separation of public and private lives was once more pronounced for LGBT people but that extremity has been waning, not only because of progress that has been made here in the UK but because of another phenomenon - social media.  I was discussing this concept recently when I was reminded that the idea of presenting a persona or a construct to the world through the internet that is the "best" version of yourself, the most relatable version, the most likeable version, is something that is common across all social media platforms.  These platforms feed their users a limited number of metrics, taking twitter for example, your like count, retweet count, and follower count to name a few, all of these metrics essentially serve as your scorecard, with the platform designed to reinforce behaviour and encourage the continued posting of content that increases those scores.

Going beyond social media however, any job or any role in which you as a person must interact with the general public can be seen in the same way.  It is an inevitability that you must appease the public if you are to engage with them as part of your job, your advocacy, or whatever social endeavour you embark upon.  That appeasement causes the rift between your private persona, and your public persona, to naturally grow over time.  The more you shape the latter persona to fit with what other people want, the further it diverges from your own desires.  To put it bluntly, the more you give others what they want, the less you get of what you want.

There is a quote I quite like to refer to which really cuts to the bone here with this mentality:- "That's the problem with putting others first, you've taught them you come second"

When you begin to recognise this divergence between the two and the problems it causes for your own mental health, you have two options.  The first is to try and reconcile the two personalities and maintain them both in coexistence, whilst the second, is to abandon the public persona entirely and revert to your own natural state.  You might be thinking there is a third option here, to let the public persona take over and abandon your private persona entirely, however that won't work.  The reason it won't work is because the private persona is your default state, it is the path of least resistance, the persona that requires the least effort to maintain.  If you abandon it entirely, and try to replace it, the amount of energy required increases over time until you reach a point where you can no longer maintain it, and a full scale emotional breakdown occurs, whereby the private persona reasserts itself, the extremity of this transition depends on how far the two diverged, with severe divergence causing trauma as this process unfolds.

You can not deny who you are, you can not repress who you are.  If you buy the idea that you can, the person who tried to sell that idea to you is not a friend to you.

There are only two options, to reconcile the two, or to abandon the false persona you have presented, there is no third option here.

Abandoning the false persona can be traumatic in and of itself, to transition from one persona that others have come to know you as, to that of your true self is a process that in most cases many of the people who came to like you for your false persona won't survive.  It is therefore a natural part of this transition to lose many of the people you have had surrounding you for some time.  The only people who survive this process are the people who got to see through the false pretence, who already knew part of the persona that lay underneath.  To borrow a metaphor, the people who aren't shocked when you remove your mask are the people who have already seen glimpses of the face behind it, when you eventually remove the mask there is usually relief for these people to see the face behind the mask and smile and say "There you are" finally.

The longer you wear that mask, the more fear and anxiety is built up and attached to the idea of removing it.  This can reach its zenith with the belief that all of your endeavours will fail miserably if people were to see the real you.  This is rarely the case, the reason for this is because despite how much we might like to convince ourselves that nobody can tell we are wearing a mask, or that no-one can possibly see through it, the truth is, most people can - they just choose to ignore it.  There is a saying that people are blind to that which is standing right in front of them staring them in the face, this is true in many respects, even literally so, if you've ever tried "TfL's Awareness Test" you'll know this first-hand. 

Just as the awareness test demonstrates, people only pay attention to what they are looking for.  They ignore what they believe is obvious, unless they have reason to pay attention to it.  Those who wish to see the private version of you as a person can and will see it quite easily if they actually pay attention to you, all distractions and distortions you have tried to make to prevent them from doing that make very little difference to this intent.  What this means for those whose job it is to maintain a public persona is the realisation that hiding who you are entirely should never be your goal.  Those who want to see passed the illusion will see passed it, those who want to remain oblivious to the reality will ignore everything that contradicts the illusion.  Your focus instead should be to allow others to see the reality, to see the face behind the mask, for those who wish to look for it.  In other words stop trying to do everything with perfection, allow flaws to exist, and allow mistakes to persist, it will allow those who are looking for them to see through to the person underneath and it will relieve the pressure you place on yourself to be perfect.  As I've said in a previous post, perfection is useful for determining direction but it should never in and of itself be a destination, because you will never reach it, you'll drive yourself to insanity trying to.