Other People

Something that I’ve been wrestling with lately is the need for other people. It’s probably not the best lesson to draw from the past couple of years, but I don’t really trust myself around other people now. I don’t know who to be, so I’ll try to figure out who they want me to be and start to be that. Or I’ll define myself by the negative, not liking something, or being some way.

When I realized I was masking, I was excited to take off the mask and find out who was underneath. I was disappointed, because it seemed like there was no one underneath. I think naively I felt I would actually become a new person, a better person, a happier person, once I took off the mask. So to find only empty space was a little heart-breaking.

But the thing is, I buried and denied myself long before I started masking. The mask was built on the fly to hide the person I actually was, because I had been taught that I was inherently bad, and the way to secure love was to deny that inherently bad me and try to be the good me that everyone wanted. That was the mask, the good me that everyone wanted, and it got fifty years to grow and develop, fifty years that the real me didn’t get.

Also, I had to get to a point where I trusted the part of me that I’d been hiding. No one hides and denies themselves by accident or for fun. This was a hard painful thing that was done for survival. There were good reasons you locked yourself in the basement and just because you’ve unlocked the door doesn’t mean you are ready for what’s on the other side.

You have to learn to trust yourself again, and that’s really hard to do, especially when the trauma that happened to you that caused you to bury yourself happened when you were so young because that trauma is so big and scary and overwhelming.