When I was in my late teens, early twenties, long before I went to therapy, I would often get comments about being a b*tch. Actually, people didn’t say I was a b*tch, but they would say my face looked like I was. I had RBF. This caught me off guard because I didn’t feel that way inside. In fact, inside I often felt insecure and out of place. My “b*tch face” was a mask, a cover up or an armor that protected me from the world, or so I thought. If people were afraid of me, perhaps they wouldn’t be able to hurt me was my unconscious train of thought. I didn’t really want people afraid of me, but more importantly, I didn’t want them to see my pain.

Do you wear a mask?
Do you hide behind a persona or a fake way of being?

To be honest, I think most of us do, at least some of the time. We hide when we don’t feel safe in the world. When I was younger I had no sense of what or who was safe so everyone got the same treatment. “You have an edge”, I used to get told all of the time. Believe me, I had no edge. But I thought if people thought I had one, they wouldn’t hurt me. And it worked. People didn’t hurt me in obvious ways. I wasn’t bullied. I wasn’t harassed. No one teased me or made me feel small. I created a persona that seemed tough and it seemed to make people behave around me.

But it didn’t work in a real way. People didn’t know me. I was a fake. When I would leave parties or get togethers I would often collapse in tears at my internal loneliness. You see, my mask I put on kept people away from really knowing me. I wanted and didn’t want that all at the same time. Everyone wants to be known, really, we are just afraid. By my late teens I had already been taught that life wasn’t safe. I had already seen things that told me that other people could be cruel in ways that didn’t seem real. I already knew, or thought I knew that the only “safety” for me was to keep people away. My mental health was fragile and I was often fearful.

I remember once a really nice guy asked me to go to a football game with him. I agreed and we made a plan for him to pick me up on Sunday. For reasons that were unclear to me at the time, I became more and more anxious as the week went on. I was terrified and I couldn’t imagine actually going on this date. It wasn’t because of anything he had done wrong. I now know that his pure kindness was so unfamiliar to me that I didn’t trust it. He scared me. So I did something that I still feel embarrassed and shameful about to this day. I left my apartment and I hid in my car. I waited as I watched him get out of his car, with a spare football jersey for me over his shoulder, and disappear into my building. I watched as he eventually returned to the parking lot, looking bewildered as he looked around and eventually got in his car and left. Years later I realized that this “nice guy” was able to see past my act. He was nice to me in spite of my RBF and I wasn’t ready for that. He was kind, and I hated and loved it simultaneously.

So I see you. I see your act and I feel your pain. Eventually the armor has to be dissolved, the mask laid aside, and the risk of being hurt has to be endured. Because on the other side of the risk is the chance for healing. The chance to know that there are kind people out there that will love you. But more importantly you can endure it even if they aren’t. You will find an inner strength that can tolerate the chance. You will discover you can show your inner self to people who you believe deserve it and even if they aren’t always kind, the payoff is mental health healing.

You are seen.

I see you.