Tuesday, November 27, 2007

being safe

A friend said the following to me tonight:
    "I tried to become what I once hated. I enjoyed it periodically. I assimilated under false pretenses, effectively, successfully, but not comfortably. I wasn't comfortable with myself; I wasn't proud. I was an imposter. But the people around me weren't astute enough to pick up on it so my correction had to come from within. I corrected it."
The most telling line was when he was trying to explain the things he had done in order to be someone he was not. "I can't really explain why I did it. It felt right and it felt SAFE."

And it made me wonder how much people give up in order to stay safe. And that by extension made me sad.

And as he was explaining it occurred to me that people don't often really love other people. They don't know other people well enough to do so. They love their ideal of a person, the mask that that person projects. Isn't that tragic, to fall in love with a mask? A mask the person might don in order to stay safe?

I guess I'm not safe.

And that makes for some interesting times, in the least pleasant sense of the word. I fall very hard.

I still think it's worth it.

3 comments:

Jewish Atheist said...

Isn't that tragic, to fall in love with a mask?

I think it's far scarier that someone might fall in love with my mask and not me. As I've gotten older, I've learned to make a real effort to lower my mask around anybody I'd like to be close to.

Scraps said...

I'm afraid of the same thing as JA--that people like my mask, not me. And it's very hard for me to take off that mask to let people in...so I never really know. Which, of course, just makes me doubt myself more. (Brilliant, I know.)

But the thing is...even with the mask, you're not really safe. Because even when you're fooling everyone else, you can't fool yourself, at least not completely.

You do fall hard...but at least you're real.

haKiruv said...

And as he was explaining it occurred to me that people don't often really love other people.

I was thinking about this on the way to work. What's scary is when the people that say they love you the most, don't really know you all that well.