Social Masks and their connection to anxiety
Anxiety in general is caused by feeling uncertain of what the future holds. This is why you feel anxious even for positive things like your graduation day, wedding day, etc. At the root of this anxiety is of course an uncertainty that you feel about how other people will react to you, but this is only part of the story, a greater uncertainty is the one which you feel towards yourself. You doubt your ability to successfully do some activity and thus anxiety is generated especially if there will be people around who are potentially going to judge or ridicule you.
Why do people feel uncertain about their ability to do things? Shouldn’t they have complete certainty about what they can and can’t do? The answer is surprisingly no. People for the most part are unaware of themselves and what they’re truly capable of.
We’ve found that even though most people believe they are self-aware, self-awareness is a truly rare quality: We estimate that only 10%–15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria. - Harvard Business Review
Most adults believe they understand themselves, but in reality, they only understand some identity that they borrowed a long time ago. Let me explain what I mean by this. Most people when they were young and trying to find a place for themselves in the world, realized the need to have an identity that would enable them to find friends and romantic partners. They would have looked around and seen a plethora of identities from which to choose from, they could choose to copy the identity of their parents, that of their siblings, their peers, or those presented in the media. These are ready made identities and all one needs to do is to observe and mimic what the identity demands and instantly you will have a set of borrowed characteristics that you can use to make friends with other people who share in this same set of characteristics. This identity that you borrowed is what is known by some people as your social mask.
This mask is what you present to the world and is expressed in how you dress, speak, and behave. Pay attention to the term “social mask”. It’s called a mask because it’s not who you really are. Its purpose is to veil that which you truly are. Most people put that mask on when they are young and never take it off again. They don’t make a conscious effort to keep the mask on but rather it is via their unconscious mind that they keep it on. Somewhere deep in their psyche they have a sort of fear that were they to take it off, the people around them would disapprove of them and thus they would find themselves shunned by the community that had originally accepted them when they first decided to place the mask on.
Are masks a bad thing? Not necessarily, though the mask may not be a completely accurate reflection of who you truly are, as long as it’s close enough to your true self, you can live out a healthy and fruitful life. However, if the mask has a lot of differences with your true self then you will find yourself ridden with anxiety because at some level your psyche is having to deal with the glaring set of contradictions and hypocrisies that only it can see. You claim you’re a tough gangster who is willing to put their life on the line for the sake of respect but your true self is a pacifist who would much rather mind not pay mind to others so you end feeling a great deal of anxiety when you get involved in a situation with another person because outwardly you want to fight but inside you you want nothing more than to walk away. It is these contradictions between who you claim to be and who you truly that are the source of most of your anxiety. If you know who you are, for better or worse, you at least know what to expect and thus their is no uncertainty to cause you anxiety.
The solution to this is to explore who you really are deep then and then begin living more authentically.
