Unmasked
In this week’s episode, we’ll be focusing on the emotion that’s provoked when the maintenance of an external performance of identity slips. The emotion we’re exploring this week is the feeling of being unmasked.
Defined literally, a mask is something designed for a person to wear over their face, covering the face itself with something else. A mask obscures the face of the person who wears it, but also reveals a personality of its own. So, to feel unmasked is to feel as if one performance of identity has been removed, making it possible for others to observe something of the self that had been hidden from view.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast about the diversity of emotional experience. My name is Jonathan Cook. I’m a research consultant who studies the subjective side of humanity.
When I talk about the subjective side of humanity, I’m talking about the internal experience that people have of themselves, in contrast to the external performance of themselves that they create for consumption by others. External appearances of how people seem to be feeling often don’t match the emotions that people are feeling on the inside.
In this week’s episode, we’ll be focusing on the emotion that’s provoked when the maintenance of an external performance of identity slips. The emotion we’re exploring this week is the feeling of being unmasked.
Defined literally, a mask is something designed for a person to wear over their face, covering the face itself with something else. A mask obscures the face of the person who wears it, but also reveals a personality of its own. So, to feel unmasked is to feel as if one performance of identity has been removed, making it possible for others to observe something of the self that had been hidden from view.
Of course, not all the masks people wear can be tied on with a piece of string. People wear figurative masks as well, making deliberate choices to present themselves in a manner that seems authentic, but doesn’t match what they’re feeling on the inside.
Consider the case of Sonja Kresojevic. Sonja was born in the nation of Yugoslavia, a country that put on the appearance of unity during the Cold War, but which splintered into bitter, violent conflict when the power of central authority fell away.
In the aftermath of this national splintering, Sonja herself experienced a proliferation of different versions of herself. Beginning in her childhood, Sonja’s life was characterized by frequent transitions. Even now, as an accomplished woman, she is many things: A strategist, a painter, a consultant.
Sonja Kresojevic:
There is no one thing that I do. I'm doing multiple things. In my previous career, I worked in innovation and product strategy, so that was kind of my background. I have a double master in engineering, but I didn't really ever work in engineering. So it's interesting, you know, again, choices I have made as a young self, thinking that this is what was expected of me and realizing later in life that those are not things that ever suited me. I really had to put a lot of effort in order to be successful in that world using and developing skills that were not as natural to me as it is, you know, things that I do now.
Jonathan Cook:
Sonja hints at a conflict between what others expected of her and what she felt comfortable with. For a long while, Sonja complied with expectations, performing a version of herself that pleased others but felt unnatural to herself. She created a mask of success to conform with the role others had assigned for her, but the effort required to maintain that mask became too much.
Eventually, Sonja decided to try to remove her mask, to reveal her authentic self. The trouble, she discovered, is that she was wearing many masks.
Sonja Kresojevic:
I don't think it's one moment of unmasking. I think it's a process of unmasking. You know, I was raised in a very peculiar set of circumstances. I grew up in ex-Yugoslavia. I left during the war, and I think without going into too much detail around it, it's really a defining, one of those defining moments of my life, you know, leaving on that big journey of not really knowing where I'm going, leaving something behind that I didn't necessarily wanted to leave, but it was beyond my control or circumstances. It's coming to thirty years now, and I think it's a significant moment of, I felt in the last couple of years that I have gone the full circle. You know, I left a country that wasn't really mine anymore because I was born in Yugoslavia. All of a sudden, because of the really civil war, I was pushed in a way of choosing who I am and what I am, and I couldn't.
I moved to Canada, then to US, then back to Europe, then back to US, then you know, back to Europe. And every time I was kind of faced with the same set of circumstances. I was in the US in San Francisco when the Twin Towers came down and Bush decided to go to war and felt very familiar to me, and I didn't want to be part of that. So I came back to Europe, and then I was in New York during Trump reign and left and came here through Brexit
Maybe that’s a story I kept saying to myself. Maybe that's one of the masking or unmasking that happens, and then there is the personal story. You know, I was born in a family of two girls, and my mom was nineteen and she had me. I played a very peculiar role in my original family. I was told from early age that, you know, I'm a big girl. I, I can handle it. My sister's was always young. My mom was really a beautiful soul that just couldn't find her place in this world and raised me as a friend, not as a mother. And so I was the one who carried a lot of burden in my family. So I assumed this role where I was of help, of service, of being a mother to everyone, even before I had my children, but never felt safe to show up, never felt safe to really show who I am. And then you combine that internal story which came from, you know, the way I was raised with this external story of never feeling that I belonged anywhere. I just felt that I learned early on in life how to put a mask and how to mimic what was going on around me and to make sure that I fit in in whatever set of circumstances internally or externally are around me. But that meant that I didn't really ever show up as me.
Jonathan Cook:
Sonja had become such an adept mimic, moving not only in space between cultures, but also from role to role associated with different social relationships, that she lost track of herself. Her masks helped her to blend in, but to the point of becoming invisible to herself. Sonja had lost her internal story about who she was.
Sonja Kresojevic:
I often think that we try to go on this journey, call it spiritual or whatever you want, but because we are not ready or the fear is so strong that that unmasking becomes a bit superficial. You know, we unmask certain parts of ourselves. We change jobs, or we leave relationships. We do something, but if the structure underneath is still solid, you just replace one story with another. I think, you know, I've been through many heartbreaks in life, but breaking that story and breaking myself apart, it's probably the hardest thing I ever had to do. When you really look, you look yourself in the mirror and you don't know who you are anymore, and you realize that everything that you were holding on has to go. Every story you ever told yourself or every belief you ever had. And slowly, I think after that you start to heal and you start to create space for something else.
You know, Rumi calls that ‘to take a step with no feet’ and I love that line. You really have no idea where you're going, and there is no security because, you know, the security came from the internal narrative. It never came from external world, for me. But when you break that narrative apart and you can't rely on it anymore either, I think this is when you start to grow and you start to explore and you start to give yourself permission to be something else and you don't know what it is, and I'm still uncovering, and the more I don't know, the more exciting this is.
Jonathan Cook:
Sonja’s transformation began with the realization that she had been wearing a mask. However, the simple decision to remove her mask became more complicated when she realized that she had been wearing many masks, one on top of another.
Now, in her life as an artist, Sonja is pursuing a practice of perpetual unmasking, a process of self-discovery that she describes as an uncovering of herself, breaking her own narrative apart with no idea of what she will find beneath it.
Such a process of unmasking requires great bravery, because the masks that people wear are not mere ornamentation or play acting. Masks often serve a function of protecting the people who wear them, hiding the vulnerable places where they can easily be hurt. Many times, the masks people wear hide people’s vulnerabilities from themselves, enabling the maintenance of a performance of the self in denial of the terrible impact of traumatic events.
This was the kind of mask worn by Eric Christiansen, a creator of documentaries whose latest film is called Unmasking Hope.
Eric Christiansen:
My name is Eric Christiansen, and I'm a filmmaker. I really don't like the word filmmaker. I'm more of a messenger and I guess a conveyor of emotions maybe, you know, with my work, which started over thirty years ago, this particular niche, I guess you're saying I’m in about filmmaking, about telling the story after trauma and telling the story of hope and recovery and all the myriad emotions that these survivors go through. But thirty years ago, I lost my home in the Painted Cave Fire disaster in Santa Barbara, California, and I was a filmmaker then, but I was doing a very, very different kind of filmmaking. I was doing commercials, music videos, and but after losing my home in that fire, kind of hitting my bottom. I kind of erased, the slate that went before and started a new, got clean and sober, and I made my first film, called Faces in the Fire that was about surviving that fire and the recovery afterwards.
I've done four films in this kind of genre, I guess you would say, with my latest being Unmasking Hope. One of the things that these survivors do, we have 9/11 survivors, we have mass shooting survivors, sexual trauma survivors, one of the things that the survivors do, and why we named it Unmasking Hope is we put a mask on top of our persona, and that covers up our emotions, or we just feature one emotion by having that mask.
Jonathan Cook:
If you’re struggling to understand what masks have to do with trauma, just think of the masks that we wore during the global trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those masks protected us from others, and protected others from us. The masks of the pandemic came to represent our isolation, and the desperation we felt in a perilous situation that was beyond our control. We hid inside our homes, and even when we ventured out, we remained hidden behind our masks.
Eric Christiansen:
We came up with the name for the film and started working on the film before the pandemic, and there's a strange irony about this whole masking thing that we all went through because it brought it into a very literal real world with the actual masks. As anybody can tell now that has have worn the mask, it becomes very difficult to read somebody else. It becomes very difficult to convey your own thoughts or emotions with that mask on.
I think we've all struggled with that through the pandemic, wearing these masks and trying to communicate because we're not using our faces and it's just such a huge tool, to convey our feelings through our face.
Carl Jung calls it a persona. You know, our persona is our mask. It's our being, and that personality that we present to the world and that covers up a lot, that persona. We can hide behind that persona. We call it a mask in our use, in Unmasking Hope.
Jonathan Cook:
Such is the power of masks that even when a mask appears to serve a merely functional use, it soon takes on a psychological role. The masks we wore during the pandemic provided literal protection from the inhalation of coronaviruses, but also enabled us to play the role of good neighbors, even as they hid the feelings of terror and display from those we encountered in public places.
Putting on these masks was, in a practical sense, a simple thing to do. We pulled the straps over our ears, tightened them over our noses, and we were ready to step outside within seconds. The emotional burden of masking, however, became unbearable for some. The masks represented an acknowledgement of our fears, especially the fear of death.
In a similar way, Eric’s documentaries explore the ways in which survivors of trauma put on masks that enable them to cope with their loss in the short term, but become burdens in themselves the longer they are worn.
Eric Christiansen:
The interesting thing about the mask with a trauma survivor is the mask usually starts out as a working part of their survival. For the mother that gets up in the morning, she has to get her kids off to work, so she puts on that mom mask. She puts on, no matter what the pain is, she puts on that mask, gets things done, gets things taken care of and takes care of her family, etc., etc.. It's when the mask overtakes us, when the mask we can't take that mask off anymore, we’re scared to show the world what's behind this because they're going to find out something about us because we're kind of broken deep down. It goes back to the word that I chose: unmasked. When we are unmasked, we're naked and vulnerable. We've taken off that persona that we show the world. They're like, oh, my gosh, they're going to see who I really am, but are they going to accept me? Are they going to see the broken me? Are they going to see that I'm not, I don't have it all together or whatever that may be. Going back to how it really works in Unmasking Hope, it's about these people that have went through severe traumas, put that mask on, had difficultly taking that mask off. It takes a lot of different avenues. That mask can be a lot of different things.
It's also about the healing that happens when we start to heal and that mask starts to come off and we start to be unmasked. It's a hope following that, because then we get to our real selves and a lot of times it's a brand new self. It's not the person that we were before the trauma, necessarily. It's this new person that's coming up, and that new person, you know, has a lot to offer the world because they've been through something that really tried them and really tested them. And we take that mask off and then we can hopefully go help others or, you know, have a testimony about the power of resilience.
Jonathan Cook:
Eric describes how survivors wear masks to obscure their pain, to create the appearance that in spite of their tragedies, they remain unbroken. Of course, a mask in itself can’t heal an injury. It merely hides the damage. He argues that healing becomes possible when the mask of strength is removed, allowing a person to develop a new, more authentic identity that displays the damage of trauma along with the resilience to keep going in spite of it.
This isn’t a lesson that Eric learned just by talking to other people about the trauma they have been through. Eric’s journey as a documentarian began with a trauma of his own, the Painted Cave Fire that destroyed his home and exacerbated his already troublesome use of alcohol and mind-altering drugs.
Eric Christiansen:
All my films have the core in my own experience in recovery. And you know, I'm still in recovery from drugs and alcohol. I'm still a man in recovery. For thirty-two years, I've been clean and sober now, and I have to I have to work it every day. So it is a key part of my life. And it's also my entree, I guess you would say, into. My ability to empathize with these individuals that are in my film, being able to connect in a very real way and understand their journey. I'm not in their shoes, but I do have a very good understanding of their journey, while even though it's very different than mine. That's the gift that I got from having went through that. The funny thing in this whole thing is that the fire itself, yeah, it was definitely a disaster in my life, but I was the one that really caused my own trauma, by my drinking and drugging, by my reaction to that disaster. So, I understand trauma and I understand the recovery afterwards.
Jonathan Cook:
For Eric, mind-altering substances created a mask that seemed to soak into him, to create a performance of a different version of himself that was so immersive that he soon became lost within it.
Eric Christiansen:
I'm always discovering that I'm wearing a mask still. It's like, oh, okay, maybe I have to let that down. But then going back to the actual fire, you know, the first mask I put on was I was already not a social drinker, a drugger, and what happens with trauma is people have preexisting conditions, whatever it may be, but the traumas have a tendency to exacerbate it and bring it out big time. So my mask became after the fire, well, you would drink also if your home burned down. It's a great excuse, but it's also a mask and something to hide behind, and it did protect me in a certain way from like dealing with the fact of, I had so many other issues, why I drank too, but it all came to a head with that. That was like my initial mask. Until I discovered that there was a way out, seven months later, after that fire, and I met with a group of guys, a group, a well, not just guys, men and women, similar to myself, then I saw, oh my gosh, those people don't drink anymore and they seem to be happy. That's when my mask started to crack there. I knew there was a way out. I felt pretty hopeless in my addiction, and that was the trauma that I put on myself after the trauma. I saw other people leading the way that were sober, that were living the life. And that's when my mask started to come down.
Jonathan Cook:
Eric talks about the way in which the protection of wearing a mask comes at a cost. Masks hide the people who wear them, growing in power until eventually, there can seem no hope of ever taking the mask off.
Another person who helps others gain the courage to take off the masks that hide their identities is author Lee Wind. Lee writes books for young people who are struggling with the fear of self-expression in a world that sometimes literally punishes people for displaying aspects of identities that don’t conform with normative expectations.
Lee Wind:
I guess a lot of what I write are the books that I wish I had had when I was a kid growing up. So I'm gay, but I was very closeted and didn't come out until my twenties. So a lot of the books I write are for that closeted gay eleven year old. That little kid needed to know that they weren't alone in the world. And I'm also Jewish. I was raised Jewish by parents that immigrated to America from Israel. And unfortunately, they sort of brought their homophobia with them. But. They also wanted to instill in me a sense of pride in being Jewish, being raised in a community that wasn't particularly Jewish. So that was an interesting sort of disconnect, though. My first picture book is Red and Green and Blue and White, which is inspired by history, inspired by a true story that happened in Montana, in a community that was mainly celebrating Christmas. There was one house that was celebrating Hanukkah, and they had it decorated for Hanukkah. There was a hate crime. Someone threw a stone through the window of the little boy's room in that house, the window that had been decorated for Hanukkah. The community sort of stood up against that hate and. In my sort of inspired retelling, there are two sort of pivot points. One is that the little boy and his family have to decide, are they going to, they repaired the window, but then the next night, are they going to put up their decorative menorah and their decorations again, or are they going to kind of hide being Jewish, which is very resonant for me as a Jew, because, you know, many of my extended family were killed in the Holocaust and the whole Kristallnacht thing with Germany.
So, there's a lot to be said for standing up for yourself. But then this little boy had a friend across the street, and she's inspired to, when she sees that they do relight their decorative menorah, she wants to do something for her friend. And so, she draws a picture of a menorah and puts it up in her window, and that is it next to all their Christmas decorations. And so that really inspires a movement in the whole town, and in real life, even the local newspaper printed an editorial asking people to put up, with a giant image of a menorah, asking people to put up the image of the menorah in their windows, in solidarity. In the space of three weeks, over 10,000 homes and schools and businesses and libraries displayed both the symbol of Hanukkah and the decorations for Christmas. And so the Hanukkah colors are sort of blue and white, and the Christmas colors are red and blue, red and green, which is why the book is called Red and Green and Blue and White, because when we all stand up together, we're stronger, and that's sort of the true meaning of community.
Jonathan Cook:
Of course, outside of books, when people express identities that don’t fit with the majority’s ideas, they often don’t receive support from the people around them. Instead, they suffer what happened to Lee when he was a boy. At the age of eleven, he decided to put on a mask of heterosexuality when he saw his own family mock the gay identity he had just discovered within himself.
Lee Wind:
I remember very, very vividly being eleven years old in New York City with my family on vacation, and it was a hot summer day. We were down in the Village and we went to get ice cream and we walked into this ice cream store and the two twenty-somethings behind the counter where they had all the tubs of ice cream were dressed up basically for the tourists. It was like there was a very attractive guy in his early twenties who was really muscular with no shirt, wearing a sort of like harness with metal and leather straps and in, you know, jeans. There was a woman about the same age who was wearing a leather bra and leather pants and had a whip on her hip. They were just, it was something done for the tourists, basically, but I was eleven years old and I was gobsmacked by the guy. All of these things clicked together in my mind and standing there in line about to order, you know, chocolate chip ice cream. I just suddenly was like, oh my gosh, that is what I aspire to. That is what I want. I want to be the kind of guy when I grow up that this guy would sort of flirty smile at. It all coalesced in that moment. I was so naked and excited and just filled with hope. Nothing had ever made sense, you know, like in terms of looking at girls or being prompted to look at girls by my dad. Suddenly I was like, oh my gosh, that's the answer.
Somehow I managed to order and got my ice cream and we left and I was looking back kind of to see what my future might look like one more time. Then my family started laughing about the freaks we had just seen. I realized, like not even five minutes after that, this huge realization about who I was, that I had to keep it a secret, that they might not love me if I was honest about how I felt that being just myself might risk everything. It's very hard to talk about, but like, that is the moment that I went into the closet. I was eleven years old and I was in that closet until I was twenty-five.
That mask, I look back on it, and it's incredible how inauthentic I was, how I was acting every single day. Everything was an act. Everything was trying to be the person that I was trying to be shaped to be. And the ramifications of that came out in so many different ways in my life. I had a really bad temper when I was when I was around twelve and thirteen, I would get into screaming matches with my dad, like almost nightly for a time there. I had so much betrayal and anger and all these warring emotions within me. And yet I felt like if I was honest, I would lose my parents love and I would lose my family. And I don't know. I mean, I was eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. I went I did a lot of things because it was what I was supposed to do, but I didn't feel authentic. I dated girls. I didn't feel it, but I knew I was supposed to do it and I felt horrible. I still feel horrible looking back. I was like, I can't believe I did that. I talk to friends that are still best friends with people they went to grade school with, and I don't have any friends from grade school or middle school or high school. I have one friend from college, but it's only because I reconnected with her like five years later after I had already come out and we reconnected. But it's like my entire childhood and teens and young adulthood are seen through a mask. And, you know, when you wear a mask, you can't see very well. It gets in your way.
I look back with a lot of sadness at that time. I wish I had felt safer to come out. I wish I had had the courage to be more authentic, but it didn't feel safe. And, you know, my message isn't that everybody should come out and be authentic 100% right now because it's just not safe sometimes for people to do it. And we have to acknowledge that and be real. But maybe at least in your mind, you can be safe. You can create a safe space to be authentic, and then hopefully get to a place in your life where you can be yourself.
The process of unmasking, I think, is also really interesting because it's not just a one time thing. Coming out is a continual thing to the point where now as an adult. I literally worked into every conversation. When I am meeting a new person within the first minute, I will let drop that. I have a husband and I present very masculine. This is just audio, but like I make it very clear that I am gay really early on in meeting somebody new because I do not want to waste my time. I am too old and if somebody is going to be weird about my being queer, then I don't need to interact with them and I would rather not frontload that litmus test and find out right away if they're going to be weird because I've been burned too many times. When my husband and I had our daughter and we were raising her from a newborn, we had just moved to a new neighborhood of Los Angeles, and that didn't have a lot of two dad families. And it was just a constant, constant coming out like in the supermarket. Oh, Mom's day off, you know, at the at the gas station. You know, like just every single interaction was me coming out over and over and over again. No, my husband's at work. No, her other dad is meeting us at the park, just and, you know, going back to that idea of being a lighthouse and, like, you know, sometimes it's just living your life changes the world. Like if you live your life authentically, you're kind of changing the world just because people are seeing, oh, look, there is a way to live authentically.
I remember we had, you know, the person that ran the preschool that we our daughter went to. Basically, you have a very emotional moment with us because she had never had a two dads family there before and she didn't know. All she knew was the stereotypes. She thanked us for sort of helping her have a better understanding of sort of our shared humanity. I feel like the process of being authentic when it's not what the everybody expects around you is a continual unmasking until the until you reach a point where you're like, I'm just not going to do it. I'm not going to put on a fake mask for you like.
You know, there's a point at which when you when you have, you can travel the world, you can go anywhere. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to go to any country where being authentic self is illegal. So, like, you know, we were talking about going on a trip to, you know, a country and I was like, no, I'm not going to go because I don't want to have to be nervous about that. I don't want to have to, you know, here's why I don't want to support them with my money. But most of all, I don't want to I don't want to go to jail. I don't want to I don't want to have to hide. I don't want to pretend. I spent too long pretending.
Jonathan Cook:
At the age of twenty-five, Lee Wind took his mask off and admitted that he is gay. To understand why he chose that moment to come out of the closet, we could look at the immediate circumstances, the positive motivators. However, to examine only that moment would be to miss the emotional arc of the fourteen years that he avoided taking off the mask of heterosexuality.
The emotion of feeling unmasked is significant because its structure shows the importance of interpreting emotion in context. Emotion isn’t a simple static condition that can be observed and measured in a snapshot of a single frozen moment. Emotion is often felt as a trajectory between different points in time. A person can’t feel unmasked if they haven’t first felt compelled to hide some part of themselves behind a mask. The feeling of being unmasked comes about as one part of a longer struggle over performance and authenticity. It isn’t about a simple relationship between an environmental stimulus and a psychological response. The stage is set in an ongoing drama.
For that matter, Lee’s experience of unmasking isn’t a single event. It becomes an ongoing process of removing the mask of presumed heterosexuality. Masks, it turns out, aren’t only put in place by the people who wear them. Sometimes, masks are created by people who observe us, or even by an entire cultural system that advances certain appearances as a norm to which everyone is presumed to conform.
In American culture, there is an intense conflict about the norms of gender roles. Some people are dedicated to the traditional model, in which each person has only one gender, which is always in alignment with their biological sex, and which never changes. The experience of Savannah Hauk, however, doesn’t follow that traditional model.
Savannah is dual gender, presenting as female some of the time, but going under the name of Chuck and presenting as male for most of the time.
Savannah Hauk:
I am a biological male, and unfortunately, I have to label myself in this way in order to describe who I am, a biological male, assigned male at birth. I am dual gender, which in my specific case means that I have a periodic feminine expression to match with my gender identity. So in 85 percent of my life, my day, I am male, and then for the other 10 to 15 percent of my life, I am presenting as female in a very binary way, even though I am considered non-binary. I advocate. I write books. I do TED talks. I do workshops, all as Savannah, which is kind of ironic because it seems like for somebody who has 15 percent of my life, she definitely takes over a lot more of my actual energy. So, that's pretty astounding. But I do have a day job, so now my male side gets to bring the money and pay the taxes, so it works out pretty good.
In 1996, years after I was born, there was this whole other origin of me stepping into the name Savannah, stepping into the heels of Savannah, putting on the wig, putting on the clothes, going out to the clubs with people that love me and who could protect me and serve as surrogates to shepherd me along. And here I am, going clubbing in Manhattan in the nineties, which was a huge step for me as well.
Cross-dressing is not an identity, is just an art form that I use. So with that light bulb in my head, it really boiled down to was like, Well, what am I? You know, people always say, it's like, why do you cross-dress? It really should be: Why do you cross-dress in the way of like, oh, you're a cross-dresser. It really is what is that driver? What is that gender diversity that requires the art form to take place in that way?
So in that reality, my dual gender identity is who I am. That is my identity, and cross-dressing just helps me to present it.
I've written two books about cross-dressing. They are both called Living with Cross-dressing. The first is Defining a New Normal, and the second is Living with Cross-Dressing: Discovering Your True Identity. They are tackling relationships that are tackling cross-dressing one on one, why you cross-dress. Should you cross-dress? Like kind of get rid of some of the myths out there, and misconceptions about cross-dressing is.
Jonathan Cook:
As with Lee, Savannah was presented with one mask that they were expected to wear for life. Savannah describes this as like a confinement, like being a house with its windows always closed to prevent prying eyes from peering inside.
Savannah Hauk:
Unfortunately, with somebody like myself who has faced parents who would talk about the kid they thought was gay across the street and how they talked, the tone in which they talked about it made me very early on say, hmm, I think I'm going to not tell my parents about what I like to do. And that pretty much shuttered to me in a way that I had to dampen my fire.
Jonathan Cook:
With Savannah, the dynamic of unmasking is complex. They step between identities, adopting one mask, and then another. Timing is of the essence in Savannah’s transitions, because each mask comes with its own rules. Coming out from under the judgment of their parents, Savannah still has to create a new set of rules for each version of themselves, behaving in a way that fits the present context. There are places only Savannah will go, and places only Chuck should be.
Savannah Hauk:
There was a time when I was sitting in my office and this quarterly executive meeting. We're all sitting on this big table watching a PowerPoint, blah, blah, blah, quarterly this profit that, and you know, we're all glazing over, but we are still paying attention. And I looked down and I realize that my hands again, this is in Chuck mode, I realized my hands were one over the other on top of the cap of my knee and my legs were across in a very feminine way. Now that was purely natural on my part. It was comfortable. I felt comfortable doing it, but I was unaware that I had done it and very quickly up a very discreet way. I made sure that I took a more masculine pose in sitting. So to not bring in draw attention to myself because of fear of how people would perceive that, that way of presenting yourself. Like, oh, he might be gay, or it might be a little, a little, little feminine. It's like, I didn't need that. So for me, in a lot of ways, Chuck is a lot of times the mask I wear, because I do only allow certain people into the world of Savannah. Savannah is that person I have to sequester in different ways because I have to make a risk assessment about who I feel. Is worthy. Which is it's kind of a terrible way to put it, but it is worthy to know me in my full self. It like is deserving of that. Or if I feel like I'm keeping something from them and I think they deserve to know me fully is when I tell them about Savannah. So again, I live a life that's eighty-five, ninety percent Chuck. So with that in mind, I'm always keeping something away from the world because Savanna only comes out on a Sunday or goes to special workshops or TedX recordings or whatever it is that happens purely in a very pocketed part of my life. Therefore, you could say that Chuck is a mask I wear all the time, only because I am not revealing Savannah to the world either.
I have heard that being said about alter egos and secret identities, and there is even a point to be made that, well, when you put all that makeup on and you put all the padding on and in the wig, you're wearing a mask. Well, I mean, yes, but then you could have to say that about every woman who has gone to Ulta and bought cosmetics or wears high heels. I mean, you could say that about every woman who puts lipstick on it that they're masking themselves in some way. Ironically, in my case, wearing that makeup is twofold. One, the better I am at it, the more protected I am in public, because if I can blend in, so I can stand out and be very, you know, put on a lot of makeup and be very it girl. But yet, because of that, I can blend in and be perceived as a female, which gives me a lot of protection from people who may want to hurt me if they thought I was really a man in a dress. So in that way, the mask I wear is really more of armor than it is a mask. In that way it is, yeah, it's just, but yet I'm putting all this extra stuff on me that I would normally never do as a man. So is it a mask or is it really what I need to do to bring out the truth on my feminine side? So which one is the mask? I mean, I sure, I could probably write a whole thing or a podcast about this. It's like, what mask do we actually wear? There are so many people I have met who are biologically male or female, and they spend a lifetime subscribing to I need to have the house, the husband or wife, the kids, the picket fence, the dog, the career. And then come thirty years later, they realize, oh, I'm in the wrong body. So they had been wearing, suppressing themselves and their truth for this mask in life they were living for the first thirty-five years, forty years of their life. So which is a real mask? I mean, I think we all have masks to the world. It's like I’m a podcaster, or I'm an author. I'm a TEDx speaker. I have a home life. I love my dogs. I have a career. In all those instances, we do wear masks or we only present a certain part of ourselves in that arena because that's what the brand says we should do or that's what the situation calls for. So yeah, I would question anybody who says they have not been unmasked and don't wear masks at all.
Savannah Hauk:
Savannah’s experience suggests something other than a distinction between a true self and the masks a person wears to disguise that identity. Savannah’s perspective is more in the direction of what Walt Whitman suggested when he wrote, “I contain multitudes.”
We can never display our inner selves directly to anyone, even the people we are closest to. We can try to explain ourselves, but our social performances are always indirect expressions. What others see of us is always incomplete. Our words, our body language and our facial expressions are superficial indications of ourselves, outward manifestations that often don’t match our internal emotional lives.
Is this dishonesty? Perhaps full honesty isn’t possible. A day lived in complete authenticity would be exhausting, and could lead to self-destruction.
As Savannah says, we all wear different masks. It’s just that some of our masks are more obvious than others. The feeling of being unmasked is the feeling of that a certain performance of ourselves has dropped, allowing people to see something else. What lies beneath, however, may be just another mask, which in turn can be exchanged for another.
The feeling of being unmasked is a reminder that identity is not solid and stable. Our sense of self is fluid, changing from moment to moment.
That isn’t to say that we are incapable of perceiving anything about the people around us. No mask is completely opaque.
In that direction, next week we will examine the emotion of dadirri, the feeling of deep listening.
Until then, thanks for listening.