It's the little hair flip you do when someone who manages to look semi-decent on their way to an 8 am walks by. It's adjusting your shirt, it's looking at your reflection in the car window before you go in somewhere. But it's more than that. It's the part of you that you actually let people see. It's the face you put on, the mask you wear. It's the person you decided to become at rush to get the house you wanted. The person you became to fit in, the person you are around your friends. The person you feel like you should be, not the person you are.
Last night, I was at a church service in a room that had a screen hanging from the ceiling in the front, where the speaker was being projected for the people sitting in the back who couldn't see as well. You know what I noticed? The color was off. The speaker's shirt in real life was this vibrant red, but on the screen, it was faded. The entire image was faded, because it wasn't direct; it wasn't raw. Yes, looking at the screen you were technically still watching the speaker, but it was a processed image of him -- it was being recorded and filtered and somehow transformed into light and projected onto a screen. By the time that image actually made it to the screen, it had been through a lot of editing and changing.
I think that's what we get from people a whole lot of the time. I think you can believe wholeheartedly that you know somebody when in reality they have an entirely different thing going on inside of them that they wouldn't show you if you paid them. And I think it's sad, because I think a lot of the time when someone is hiding behind a wall like that, the reality is that their true self is so much better than the self they're presenting. It's a cruel irony, really -- you do all this work to be who you think others want you to be only to find out that had you shown them who you really were the entire time, everyone would have been better off.
Have you ever watched someone straight up living a double life? I think we're all guilty of this to some extent. In my communications class, we're talking about our ideal self vs. our ought self -- who we want to be vs. who we think we should be. I think, no matter how deep down this desire may lie, no matter how unlikely we are to ever admit it, every single person's ideal self, the person we all want to be, is the person we know we truly are. The person we're too scared to show others, the vulnerable one, the emotional one, the kindhearted one, the faithful one. Unfortunately, for a lot of us, our ought self doesn't match that. We think we should come off as cool, collected, carefree, confident. We put on a front and we rely on that front because it protects us. Whatever people think of us when we're using that front doesn't matter -- because it isn't really us, right? It isn't real.
That's the thing. It becomes real. You can only hide behind a mask for so long before it starts to become your real face, your real identity. And that's the scary thing -- to lose who you really are, to stray so far away from you, from everything from what keeps you up at night to what you really, truly can't stop yourself from laughing at to what you cry about and what you want to do with your life.
If I could tell you anything, it would be that it is never too late to stop pretending and to start living the life you know you want to live. Stop projecting a different image of yourself onto that screen and start letting people look you straight on. It may or may not be easier right away, but I know one thing, and that's that if you're not being you, no one else will be, either, and that means the world is seriously lacking in someone that was created in it for a reason.
Turn off the camera, roll the projector away, and start living.
