'Masquerade Paper faces on parade Masquerade Hide your face so the world will never find you'
Just finished re-reading Pratchett's Masquerade recently. It's truly a book I seem able to identify with, and I don't think I'm the only one. Just recently, I met someone who was my senior in secondary school on the bus home. She's now a final year business student. We spent some time discussing the topic of 'social dinners' and how important they are for one who wished to excel in the business career.
Simply put, she didn't like them. "Eeeeeeeee, so fake!" were her exact words. You can't blame her. All you do at such functions are: smile, nod, give fake little laughs, and deliver firm handshakes that were supposed to say you're a reliable person. You might as well put on a mask, and forever imprint your phony little grin on your face. You know you're only there to make 'business contacts', and everyone knows that too, because that's why they're there, as well.
The problem is, today's society encourages these false exchanges. The army encourages young men to leave their homes, their families, and their comfort zone, to enter a world of the unknown, and worse, to smile and nod it this dangerous beast, like ignorant boys. Or was it supposed to turn boys to men? I forgot.
Today was also NTU's Student Union day. Yesterday and today, we had seniors invade our lecture time to tell us why we should vote for them. It amazes me how they can lie with such a straight face. And these are our future leaders (or China's, probably)? But ah yes, politics is all about lying with a straight face. So the lie becomes your mask. If you say you are confident, you HAVE to portray yourself as such, or else the lie falls through, right?
But what I really want to ask is this: isn't it tiring, wearing your mask all day? Don't you ever want to be yourself some time? Or has the mask become who you are? Walter Plinge eventually became one with his mask, and Agnes/Perdita found that she prefered the old Walter after all. She herself had tried to run from herself, only to return to what we can loosely call her 'destiny'. Is that enough of a proof to show that being yourself is the best?
But from what I observe, it IS hard being yourself. Sometimes, when you don't know the other person well, the first instinct is always to 'shield'. Put on the mask as a second skin, protecting your face from hidden knives the other may throw at you. Only much later does it occur, perhaps, that the other person is as scared and as much in need of that shield as you are. As you two cautiously feel your way around each other, the mask slowly goes down, down, away... Or not at all. Some friends claim to have known each other for an eternity, but in fact, they don't know each other at all.
Sometimes... I admire frank, open, honest people. They can be a sort of cohesive glue that pulls the mask away from a circle of friends-to-be. He makes the group laugh together, first at him, then at themselves. In the end, everyone goes away feeling good. They've learnt more about their friends than they would have in a polite, dainty situation, like in 'social dinners'. The world needs more of these people...
Where university life will take me, I'm not sure, but every step is, as always, a journey to find the great mystery me. Who knows, perhaps after all this self-discovery, I will find that who I am behind the mask is nothing but the mask itself.