The Mask and the Beast

The mask is cold.

It stifles, it smothers.

But the world is cruel.

It shields me from the others.

.

The mask is cold.

It stifles, it smothers.

But the mask is stable.

It hides me from the others.

.

“To feel sadness is weakness.

Depression is a failure of the will.

Despair is a lack of manliness.”

Yet these maladies plague me still.

.

Like the mateless wolf,

into the night, I want to howl.

But none would hear the call,

so weakly, from the shadows, I growl.

.

The Darkness stalks me.

I feel its cold breath upon my neck.

For the mask I reach.

But all the while, the Darkness infects.

.

“You are not alone,” they say.

“There are many among us the same way.”

This clutches at an even greater fear, deep in my soul:

we are all drowning in the black waters without a lifeboat.

.

Red eyes stare at me from the shadows,

fangs glistening in a sickening grin.

With every doubt, every fear it grows.

Every shout, every tear is its kin.

.

We are hunted, you and I.

Everywhere with us it shall go.

Its aim is not for us to die,

but for us to wish it so.

.

“The mask! The mask shall save me,”

I cry in the face of the beast.

Yes, it hides my vulnerabilities

from those who scorn.

But also those who could remedy.

.

The shield grows burdensome,

and I grow tiresome.

It offers calmness, stability,

but emptiness, futility.

In the balance hangs my sanity.

.

My blemishes are concealed

but with them my true self.

Who I am, I can no longer tell

within this voluntary hell.

.

The red eyes gleam at my confusion.

I can feel them even now.

My constant comrade now disillusion.

To fight it all, I know not how.

.

“To feel sadness is weakness.

Depression is a failure of the will.

Despair is a lack of manliness.”

Yet these maladies plague me still.

.

The mask cracked, I am lost.

Moments of happiness fleeting.

Without a purpose, without a cause,

I admit my defeat.

.

Author's Note: Usually I introduce the themes and context of a poem at the opening. However, I thought I'd let this one speak for itself first, and then I could add any details after.

Let me start by saying that writing one of these notes has never been so gut wrenching. If I hadn't already published this piece on my personal blog back when I first wrote it in 2014, it would not be going on Vocal today. Instead, it would be filed away with every other poem or reflection piece under the file labeled "Personal." A place where the raw emotions and the pain captured in these words can safely bide their time until the next time I summon the courage to read these artifacts of turbulent and dark times.

However, whatever my past motivations, I felt compelled to share "The Mask and the Beast" then, and I will honor the courage of my past self by opening old wounds to place myself back in his shoes. Because to end this poem where the verse concludes feels wrong. You now know the words. But you don't know the story behind the words and where the road has led me since that day.

Let me start by not hiding behind fancy diction: I was depressed. For 18 years, I had existed in a bubble. Same hometown, more or less the same friends. Then that bubble burst. I went to college. Different town, different life, different friends. The ways I'd interacted with others before didn't work anymore. I did fairly well in classes, but in all other respects, I was flailing.

That I was unhappy is a given. But I wasn't sad about this state of affairs for the first few months. I was angry. I blamed everyone around me for not "getting it," blamed society for stacking the deck against me, blamed plenty of other things, I'm sure.

However, I had a revelation one day from the most unexpected of sources: my History of Music course. As part of the Romantic era of classical music, we studied the composer Robert Schumann and one particular song of his: "Die alten, bosen Lieder" (the old, hateful songs).

If you want a full breakdown of this song, this blog post does a much better job than I ever will and even provides an English translation (plus, the cleverness of that site name is immaculate). Without going into unnecessary detail, the lyrics describe a man who is recounting all the materials he will need to build a massive coffin. There's a certain agitation to his words for most of the song as he lists in increasingly grandiose fashion all that will be required.

But the lyrics takes a noticeable shift as he finally describes why the coffin must be so large: it will hold all of his lost love and dreams. Where the man was almost roaring before, the final lyrics are a whimper. The music similarly never regains its former bravado and fades away a short while later.

Anger as a mask to underlying anguish. The parallels to my own situation hit me like a sack of bricks. Suddenly, it wasn't so easy to cast the blame onto others. The problem started and ended with me. My agitation was a deflection, a way to avoid confronting the despair that really lurked beneath the surface.

This poem was written to delve deeper into that revelation. In it, the beast is clearly a metaphor for depression and despair. The mask is a metaphor for the ways we hide our emotion from the outside world, both to avoid vulnerability and to mask the issues we are grappling with from others.

The idea of the mask growing heavy and cracking reflects my situation at that emotional crossroad. It was no longer possible to put the mask back on, to pretend nothing was wrong. But to acknowledge the problem, I feared, would only give agency to my depression. There was no going back. Yet, I could not see a way forward. So, like Schumann's singer, I sink into oblivion in the final lines. I admit my defeat.

But that is not where this story ends. Everything so far has only led us to the point where my pen first touched the paper of my spiral notebook.

So, what did I do? My first step was to start to reach out to friends from back home. I made a point of seeing at least one each time I was in town. It helped remove the sense that I had uprooted everything I had known when I started going to JMU.

Moving into second semester, I was enrolled in a health class that required us to log a certain number of hours at the university recreation center. That helped me get into my first-ever workout routine. Not only did my physical health improve, but I had more energy and felt more confident. I decided I was tired of being ashamed of my body and to see my effort producing actual results had a whole host of good side effects for my mental health.

I also want to emphasize another emotional revelation driven by another general education course I was enrolled in: my Intro to Communications course. One of the chapters we covered discussed active and sympathetic listening, the core idea of both being that we should not be waiting for our next chance to take over the conversation but instead listening and asking questions to make the other person feel heard.

My God, I remember thinking when I had read the definitions, I don't do any of that. To me, a conversation was an opportunity to crack jokes and talk about myself. "I would define my best friends as those who know a lot about me, but not the other way around," I would go on to tell the class during individual presentations. "But that's not right. So I'm going to practice sympathetic listening. I'm going to focus less on what I will say next and more on what this person is saying right now. I'm going to do better."

And I did. In not much time at all, I noticed a deepening of my existing friendships. It made me feel much more at home with where I was, and I like to think it helped my friends feel a bit more seen, too. Maybe that helped them in turn with any issues they were wrestling with.

So whenever someone bashes on general education classes as a money sink, I always refrain from joining in. For me, at least, these classes made me into a better person.

This is not to say everything was perfect after these first few strides. But slowly I found my place, and with that new sense of belonging came confidence. Confidence grew into happiness, and from happiness, finally, came fulfillment.

Even now, though, all these years and all this personal growth later, things are still not perfect. Perhaps it's too much to expect they ever will be. I now grapple with a whole host of other mental health issues stemming from physical health issues that have challenged my self-image in a whole new way.

But the point is that nothing is set in stone. There is always something we can do in these moments, whether it's on our own or with the help of someone else. I'm sure some of you are thinking that I might have had these revelations sooner if I had gone to therapy. That this whole process of self growth would have been easier.

Maybe so. But I am proud that I figured these things out for myself. I am not trying to say that someone shouldn't go to therapy. No, sir. But if you have weighed your options and decided this is something you'd prefer to tackle solo, I say that's your prerogative. I guess the real aim of the mental health and therapy normalization movement should be to make sure everyone knows it is a choice.

No matter how you go about it, you won't make it far if you don't acknowledge the problem. That, I believe, is why I felt compelled to write this epilogue. Because "I admit my defeat" sounds like the end note.

But it was actually the first domino to fall, the crucial step I needed to start walking the road that has led me to today. It was not surrender. It was not giving up. It was casting off the blinders of denial.

It was refusing to hide behind a mask anymore.