The Masks We Wear

The Masks We Wear

A client shared a photo, and the image stays with me. It's a young girl, standing tall on a balance beam. So proud. So beautiful. I imagine she just danced gleefully, her 9 year-old limbs performing a both exquisite and adorable routine. Although young, she is powerfully connected to her own wild, d... Read Full Story

Thank you so much for this well-written and insightful article. I really enjoyed reading it and thinking about it. I have been thinking about this topic a lot in the past few weeks, and I really liked the added perspective you offered. Last week I gave a presentation on this topic to a church group. We talked about how when we put up these masks, it gets in the way of us growing personally and also gets in the way of connecting to the people around us--it creates fear and isolation.

Brene Brown has some wonderful things about this in her work on shame.

Here are some related quotations I gathered for my presentation, in case they might be meaningful to other readers:

"Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others." Marian Wright Edelman

"People tend to feel alone because we're not sharing vulnerable parts of ourselves. We want to be real so that other people can know they're not alone." Laurel Weed

"To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight--and never stop fighting." e e *******s

"Be willing to let go of who you think you should be, in order to be who you are." Brene Brown

"Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides." Anne Lamott