What are you hiding? Why do you care if they discover the real you? How does it matter if they like you or not? What personality alias have you been switching? What are you afraid of? Mask off!
No, don’t tell me they would hate you cos you know better than to fiddle. Let your inner child find expression and explore. Do not snuff out your light to accommodate other people’s darkness or expand your darkness to put out other people’s light. Mask off!
Mask off is embracing your vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and flaws as part of your human nature while you remain true to the virtues you possess. Mask off simply means accepting your shortcomings while living out your strengths with grace and in stride. Mask off entails letting go of whom they expect you to become and becoming who you were born to be. It is the freedom to be and live in accordance with the proportion of maturity you’ve attained whether in private or public. It is owning up that you don’t have all the answers while you listen and learn with an open mind. Mask off is accepting all your unchangeable bodily features and refraining from desiring features that cannot be improved upon naturally. For example, the shape of your head and the color of your eyes.
You’ll never know who you are unless you shed who you pretend to be
Vironika Tugaleva
The extreme outcome of having a mask on is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is indeed a strong word to label anyone, however, shocking statistics reveal that more than any vices plaguing the human race, we are more susceptible to hypocrisy. Although the ambiguity of this concept is unarguable due to its varied definitions and implications, I would rather prefer to narrow my conversation revolving around false identity or should I say inauthentic personality. On both ends of the spectrum, we could feign to be who we are not just to make an impression of what we are not. That is, we could act with every ounce of goodness which we don’t possess while we are seething on the inside with every pound of evil which possesses us. It is on this baseline I’ve been expatiating my discussion.
How many of us feel uncomfortable with the child within us? How many of us feel uncomfortable with our vulnerabilities? How many of us are ashamed of our flaws that we seek to hide them? How many of us unwittingly appear with a personality to others that deep within our subconscious, we know is not our essence? Mask off. Let us be more deliberate on changing what’s on the inside so that we truly reflect on the outside congruency, coherence, and integrity.