Sunday Scribblings: Masks
To quote an ultra-famous theme song for an even more famous TV show, "So no one told you life was gonna be this way..." It’s been close to a year since the world turned upside down.
These days, I collect masks. I don’t particularly enjoy wearing them, but - these days - it’s pretty much a necessity. For my safety and the safety of people around me. So I have fully embraced the mask life. I have cotton masks, sports-friendly masks, batik masks, surgical-grade masks. You name it. I always end up feeling like at any moment I’d find a mask in a nook or cranny somewhere.
One of my most frequent complaints about masks is that people can’t see my facial expressions. And I communicate a lot through facial expressions. I also can’t decipher what they are trying to communicate or, even more importantly, how they feel about what they’re communicating.
In more than one way, masks protect us. It isolates and guards us. And our thoughts. And our feelings. Masks also protect our identity. These days we are going places with pieces of cloth covering our faces. So much so that we are protected from the world ever finding out what we truly feel or even, who we truly are.
In my time as a youth pastor, one of the issues that I'm almost hyper-aware of is bullying. It happens a lot with teenagers. It happens with kids as early as grade school. It happens online, where half or even more of people's lives are lived out. I have taken some time to observe people's interactions online. Bullies, trolls, and random people who make inappropriate or even derogatory comments online seem to forego a certain part of their conscience when posting online.
It's not unlike the happenings in The Lord of the Flies, a novel I was required to read in high school and one that apparently stuck with me into adulthood. When, in the jungle, there aren't any rules and every person is for him or herself, when people believe that they are not going to be assigned consequences for their words or actions, compassion seems to get chucked out the window. Yes, friends. I am comparing the vast virtual world with a jungle on a deserted island with no rules of decency. Am I wrong?
Anonymity is a mask that we put on in our interactions online. We don't really know who is on the other side of the screen and, frankly, we don't give a damn. Yes. I am consciously using pronouns that include you and me in this interaction because one of the biggest problems of wearing this mask of anonymity is depersonalization and dehumanization of the people we interact with. Making a racist or sexist or ageist comment online doesn't seem to faze us because there's distance. And we often put that mask on and revel in the distance between who we are online and who we are in real life. That we can make comments that are hurtful because people don't know who we are, and our comments won't come back to bite us in the butt.
We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.
- André Berthiaume
In the age of the pandemic, a time that the entire human population seems to be ushered into quite reluctantly, most of our lives are lived online. From the things done in bright daylight to the things done in the dark. Wearing masks is becoming second nature to us. Physically and virtually. With a context like this, Berthiaume's quote seems very sobering. It begs self-reflection and a bit of courage to be brutally honest with ourselves.
What are the masks we put on?
How do we treat people virtually vs. in real life?
What are our motivations?
Are we the same people online vs. in person?
Are our online personas rubbing off on our real-life person?
Who are we really?
I can confess that this last question kind of scares me:
Do we even recognize ourselves without the mask?