Take care of yourself Waynie-poo!

i wonder: when we recognize each other masking, is it more polite to point it out to the person (privately, obviously publickly it would be callous), or to respect it and play along?

i remember a professor a while ago talking about how women in the restoration period of england would go out with masks to conceal their identities and be someone's mistress. but anyone who's seen someone with a mask on knows it doesn't really do much to hide anything. still, it was good decorum to pretend that you didn't recognize the person.

weird, eh? and maybe more pertinent than it seems.

everyone has a mask to hide in. Its the society that we do with masks. Masks is the only place for us to hide , its our only closet to us. The mask is our life.

Very, very well-said.

I don't know why but I'm reading your words, totally agree and think of that song "So is life" Harry Belafonte once did on the Muppet Show in 1977(?).

Do I know who you are/

Do you know who I am/

See we one another clearly/

Do we know who we are

I think that was the chorus (I didn't look it up).

Saying no can be important sometimes. Not just to avoid getting abused in an emotional way, but for the esteem of finding one's self, that was my experience in life.

We are accustomed from childhood to wear a mask. People around us expect us that we behave according to rules dictated by morality and laws.

We also learn very quickly to hide those parts of our personality that could harm us.

Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, described the attitude common to all human beings. He calls it persona, the social side to the Individual presented the World. As he said : " a kind of mask, on the one hand designed to make a definite feeling upon others, and the other to conceal the true nature of the individual".

Everyone wears a mask. It's part of human nature.