Masks
by
Heath P.

Masks are somewhat helpful. This is used in the case of particular situations, for example, dealing with policemen or any other authority figure or person capable of harming you at the moment. It depends on how you flaunt it. I wore a mask all year in school, and with some people, it was fucking aggravating for me. Sometimes its difficult to differentiate between yourself and a mask, depending on how susceptible you are to adapting to something you don’t want to. This occurs when a momentary situation is instigated into becoming more of a routine. That is, the more contact you’ve got with the harmful sources the more you’re becoming repressed. This is where a mask doesn’t help, for it becomes a self-imposed restraint.

Have you ever felt more secure wearing a mask than showing your face? A lot of people do, and for various reasons, and this is the literal meaning of the object of a mask. However, the concept I’m speaking of is relative to a person concealing themselves in a metaphorical sense. That is, concealing their true feelings, usually with a false front that is either the opposite or at least neutral to what lays beneath. In this case, a “mask” is an artificial surface someone uses to conceal themselves with, and the concealment varies with whatever circumstance.

I first came across this term when I was studying various sources on sociopathy and psychopathy. First off, there is a difference between both terms, as I’ve learned; a psychopath is considered to be a person who has no recognition for society’s values (that is what society considers “right and wrong”), lacks the ability to be empathetic or to understand others, is quite impulsive, easily annoyed or angered and overall supposedly has a lack of emotions; a sociopath is similar, but they do understand what society values and are more apt to put up a “mask” or a form of false front in order to be “in good” with the rest of society using charisma to the best of their extent (many of them do it so well they come across to be more than convincing), and they are not as openly impulsive or violent, but when in the right environment and the right circumstances, they lift their restraint. All in all, psychopaths are more impulse driven while sociopaths are more manipulative. However, considering all of this, one must understand that these people are the result of the kind of abuse they may do. To put it succinctly, they are the result of excessive emotional abuse and neglect.

The concept of the mask is more relative to the sociopath, who could be considered a “sane psychopath”. For many, it starts in childhood or any other level of youthfulness where dependence on adults is most necessary for this is where many children learn not only various physical activities such as their movement and ability to talk, but also their connections with others and in many cases how others have influence on them and vice versa.

The sociopath who had been a child could have endured various levels of torment, various forms of mental and emotional abuse, invalidation, alienation, etc., perhaps, not to sound stereotypical, from their parents or parental figures. This abuse eventually destroys the individual child’s inner will, kills their soul to an extent so to speak, inevitably destroying their emotional complex and leaving them with much pain as well as the myriad of feelings that sprout from it (resent, anger, hate, envy, disgust, and many others varying on the individual child).

In order to defend against this external assault, the child (or actually it can be any individual, regardless of age) puts up a barrier between himself and other people, blocking his emotions from others and perhaps not ascertaining anyone else’s feelings, at least not very intently. This shuts the child off from the outside world, where within, dealing with his vast emotional wreckage and the pain that caused it, he sometimes fights himself in order to sort things into his own view, putting various pieces back together in a way that he’s able to see fit. Sometimes the outlook varies, but for many psychopaths and sociopaths, there’s a common outlook: no one can be trusted, no one will help me, no one can love me. Through this, they lose regard not only for others on an emotional level, but also for themselves, despite many of them coming off as “selfish” (after all, when you are born in a house full of pain, who else is there to care for you?), many times putting themselves in harm’s way knowingly or unknowingly, for many sociopaths and psychopaths rely on “sensory addiction”, or their other bodily senses, for emotional contact has since been sabotaged. This is how many come to find many criminals, policemen (especially such), and other people in occupations centering on great risk, are indeed sociopaths or at least sociopathic. After a while, this barrier between the sociopath and other people causes him to avoid trust, empathy, and even understanding. His false front has been dubbed by psychologists as a “mask of sanity”, or at least a mask to fool common people.

However, “masks” are not exclusive to sociopaths or psychopaths. Many people use them, so to speak, in order to just hide their personality from another person, be it temporarily or for twenty or so years. The reason for the mask is no different than the sociopath’s: a means of defense from an abusive and invalidating environment. The depth of a mask varies from feeling like shit, being asked how you are, and out of fear responding, “Fine.”, to creating an entirely different individual from yourself using much charisma and charm just to fool a bunch of people. Then again, it also depends on who you’re wearing this kind of mask in front of, be it a person with a grand ability to read people, or just a variable everyman who wouldn’t know shit from Shinola. So the grandioseness varies with the depth of others, in some cases, depending on how well the “wearer” is able to flaunt their fabricated exterior. Yet, unlike sociopaths, some people don’t wear masks out of malicious intent but as mentioned before as a means of personal security.

The Mask is reinforced by one’s culture as well, where particular thoughts or feelings vary in expression from greatly accepted to wholly tabooed. For example, Yukio Mishima’s novel “Confessions of a Mask” is about a gay who lives amongst many people who also wear “masks” in order to conceal similar aspects of themselves from a society that supposedly despises such individuality. Pink Floyd’s The Wall (both album and film) is a fantastic example of how this barrier is created and how it affects others, and, sadly, how it can many times perpetuate itself. Masks are indeed harmful when put into compulsion or “left on” for a great deal of time, sometimes detaching oneself from others and sometimes detaching from themselves.

The usage of masks is rampant in this modern society. For example, a child uses a mask in order to guard against intrusive inspection from his adult counterparts, who in turn also use a mask in associating with him for they accept the traditional cliche that being “hard” on children helps them and therefore detach themselves from their actual, possibly more caring feelings in exchange for the belief that adults just have to treat their children as incompetent inferiors because of the assumption of it making them “better people”. Sometimes, especially in this society where the surface is put into excessive emphasis, a mask helps in protection, other times it just divides people from each other, reinforcing many inhibitions and fears that have been instilled to control them in this way. It causes them to fear one another of being a rapist, murderer, thief, angry youth, child-fucker, faggot, nigger or anything else such a wall or mask per se causes them to fear and in turn, generalize as I’ve exemplified in the sentence here. It causes them to make hasty generalizations of one another, building tension and fear, in turn making much animosity. All out of the fear of unknown, difference, change or harm, or anything that pushes them away from one another.

As I’ve said, masks are somewhat helpful. This is used in the case of particular situations, for example, dealing with policemen or any other authority figure or person capable of harming you at the moment. It depends on how you flaunt it. I wore a mask all year in school, and with some people, it was fucking aggravating for me. Sometimes its difficult to differentiate between yourself and a mask, depending on how susceptible you are to adapting to something you don’t want to. This occurs when a momentary situation is instigated into becoming more of a routine. That is, the more contact you’ve got with the harmful sources the more you’re becoming repressed. This is where a mask doesn’t help, for it becomes a self-imposed restraint. Many people are like this to one another, only engaging with each other on the surface for fear of what’s beneath someone else and for fear of that seemingly unknown person to tap in beneath their own surface. A fear of knowing what another feels or thinks, a fabricated fear passed down from generations to generations.

Anybody can “wear” a “mask” if they know how, and for what to do so. A lot of politicians wear masks, sometimes different ones in front of different people. So do a lot of other people.