Reading faces

How often do you wear a mask? On Halloween, at Carnival, maybe at Mardi Gras, the occasional costume party, and the occasional holdups and bank robberies?

I have known for a long time that I wear a mask. I began to realize it when I was still a child in school, elementary school.

I think we wear them every day. I know I have for as long as I can remember. There were the usual masks, of course; the dutiful son, the interested student, the attentive boyfriend... you get nowhere if not attentive... These are the usual masks of civility. We pick these up at various points in our domestication. As we are brought into submission to the civil societies in which we live.

We, I believe, are born feral. Our parents attempt to civilize us begins soon after birth. They teach us sleep patterns and feeding patterns. It's the first step. We are, of course, helpless and ignorant so we do not know what is being done to us. Then the socialization begins, soon after we start to get independently mobile. When we can crawl. We are taught the hierarchy of "family." The bigger (and, therefore, more dangerous) humans are in charge. That hierarchy gets broader and more complex as we move toward adulthood. It is expanded as we are introduced to the wider social organization. in which we live.

We are grouped along the way. We become one of a group (actually sub-group, I guess); toddler, preschooler, school child. We are further divided along stages of development as we continue to mature. All of it designed to assimilate us into the larger group.

We pick up masks along the way and shed old ones. But some of us create masks to fit in, to hide our true natures from even those around us, the ones in our subgroup. We pretend to fit in. We never take those off, we wear them under whatever mask society has chosen for us.

Some of us just realize we are masked.