A Story

In the beginning a story was told and retold until, eventually, I was born.

Over the years I felt increasingly unhappy with its story. It had had no say in it, and frankly, one of the story’s principal authors had told a rather grim and miserable story about I being a failure in every way possible.

Because this was the only story I had been taught, I came to think of itself as a mistake – it felt gawky and stupid and incompetent and isolated from others.

I struggled to find ways to fit in. And because I didn’t like the story it had been told, it told lies. Lots and lots of lies. In the form of masks.

I would try on a mask – the tall and handsome up-and-comer mask, for example – and would watch through this mask at a world that suddenly behaved different told it. I landed jobs and received promotions and basked in the affirmations.

I landed one mate after another and similarly enjoyed the ‘love’ it received.

Yet all the while I knew it was a fraud and a phony. With each new lie I feared being found out, being unmasked and shown to be the fraud I was.

New masks were required. Eventually there were so many masks I had no idea who it was. The masks were now firmly in control.

I never felt real, never felt the ground beneath its feet. I envied the easy confidence of those who did. At times I suspected that everyone was wearing a mask – sometimes many masks. But who was I to know? A liar cannot know the truth about anything.

Eventually, the weight of all those lies became too much, the masks blocking out all of the light, and I collapsed beneath the weight of it all.

Naturally, I believed the collapse was confirmation that it really was a mistake, that unlike the rest of the world, it really was a fuck up and a failure, that the story told at the start was true.

It was in the midst of this great suffering that another thought arose in a voice different from the original authors, a voice that whispered, gently, “The truth shall set you free.”

What truth, I wondered?

With nowhere else to turn, I sought out new authors in the form of sages and seers, mystics and masters, authors who, across the centuries, had uttered similar words, words that said, “Seek until you find” and “To thine own self be true.”

I noticed a common theme in their words, and a challenge. To know the truth, to know oneself, to be true to oneself, required a removal of the masks. This provoked great anxiety, but again with nowhere else to turn, I began the painful, arduous process of stripping away the masks.

The search inward was painful. I had lied for as long I could remember, had caused immense pain in itself and others. But the commitment was total, the masks must go.

Occasionally I imagined that it had reached the bottom of the pile, had at last reached its true self, and there would be a feeling of euphoria: “This – THIS is who I am!”

But soon enough I noticed the euphoria would abate, the suffering was still there, and it realized it had simply replaced one mask with another, with the “I am honest unlike others” mask, or the “I am spiritual” mask.

The journey continued. Off went any mask that claimed an identity of its own. So many masks.

Where, I wondered, was I? Where did the masks end and I begin? There seemed no end to the lies.

In the midst of this quest, something curious, something subtle, something in the background happened. For the first time in forever and ever, I noticed it felt a bit lighter, less burdened by that original life story, that original life sentence.

On the outside nothing had changed. If anything, I was having a more difficult go of ‘life,’ money was tighter, there was more isolation. But I recognized that these were the necessary byproducts of the search. The material world is not allowed to join in the search.

 

Today? The search continues, the masks more subtle, their design more ingenious, new masks always a risk. But more than ever I feel a compulsion to continue, to dig and dig until the original I – the I prior to that original story – is revealed.

I may not get there, the old anxieties and fears may still play a role. But what seems clear, is that the old story is more or less dead, and life and I are at last playing things out exactly the way we should.