The masks

I bet my entire life savings that not a single person in the world is truly himself or herself all the time – we have our entire repertoire of masks used at certain occasions with certain people at a certain time. The masks we don in front of our family members would be different if compared to the masks we wear with a certain group of friends, and even more apparent when with total strangers.

Merely my observation of course – we have the guy who falls head over heels over a girl, we have the bootlicker, the sucking-up-and-pretending-to-be-total-angels-in-front-of-others’-parents kind, the beast to the siblings, the extremely shy person, the closeted smoker, and the list goes on.

And me, I’ve a chameleon-like mask that seems to be able to blend in quite well with different people in different situations, although it isn’t apt to work most of the time. That essentially makes me think that I could easily blend into other cultures quite adeptly, were I to be stranded on a foreign land with completely bizarre unwritten rules. I’d like to think I have an uncanny ability to understand intrinsically the dos and don’ts of societal situations, and it’s being binded by this that I particularly dislike.

Though I wouldn’t put it to you that this entire brouhaha is particularly bad – I like my right to privacy but frankly it does get pretty tiring to don a few masks that force you to be someone or something that you’re not, just to survive.

Just to survive. It’s such a dog-eat-dog world filled with hypocrisy that sometimes I think I’m born at the wrong time, a few generations too early.