Horrors Revealed: Peeling the Mask Off

Picture reality as a broad mask. It can be however small or large you like it, blue or purple, but that doesn’t really matter. Now, imagine peeling the mask off and slowly uncovering the worst on the interior. How do you react? Probably with anger and pain and frustrations, right? Or do you just shrug it off? I want you to note your reaction in some way - keep it in your head or write it down, because we’re going to come back to that later.

We’ve all seen horrors in our lifetimes. Whether they’re graphic images, violent experiences or videos, harrowing moments that we’d rather forget, or emotional trauma that builds up over the years, the facade of reality that is built up within us as younger children slowly gets its mask peeled off as we age and step out into the real world.

But what does this all mean? Everyone knows the world is a place with some amazing things, but a lot more terrible ones. Of course it’s obvious that the world isn’t as great as it probably could be. Everyone knows it. However, what I don’t think is realized as often is that as soon as you realize how broad the mask is, the more horrified you become and the easier it is to get jaded.

Consider this: imagine losing your trust in a friend, acquaintance, or whomever. You’re in pain. Then consider it happening again and again and again. Consider a political problem that you think can be fixed. Until you realize that it’s harder to fix than you realized. Until you realize that unless you band with other individuals, no change can occur on such a tiny scale. Consider any scenario that you once approached with a wave of optimism or less pain, only to find it countered by a much stronger wave of pessimism, anger, and doubt.

Now, imagine building all of that up. You start to grow critical. You start to look at yourself and your own flaws. You see through the flaws of people around you, which is much easier than true introspection, but you’re progressing somewhere. You’re starting to notice some patterns.

First of all, everyone is a hypocrite. Yes, I’m a hypocrite. You’re one too - and that’s okay. The problem is that most people do not recognize the hypocrisy in their actions or the general harm that the patterns of their mistakes can cause. I admit my own guilt in this regard - and I’m sure we can all admit to that as well. However, beyond personal flaws and questionable double-standards, there’s more to the realities beneath the mask. Consider the hypocrisies like a two-face of sorts, but then you take a step back. Notice how the systems or ideas that you may have been brought up to believe in are flawed? Maybe you disagree with something now, whether in the realm of politics, religion, morality, or elsewhere in the many spheres that can, and do, define the lives of so many people.

I remember my experiences as a team captain of one of my school’s academic programs. I saw all the cracks and ironies in myself and the brokenness of certain parts within it, much to my dismay and still-held trauma. I remember going into certain spaces with optimism, thinking that I could fix it only to realize that the whole thing was far beyond repair. And that program was one of those spaces. Do I still love the program? Of course! It still had tons of benefits and memories, but there were also some horrid experiences that I will not elaborate on further.

Anyways, notice the illusion of perception? In society and in our personal lives, we are often given the best sales pitch. The best presentation to join! The advertisement for the 40% off deal at Barnes & Noble! Then, you go to Barnes & Noble and you remember how expensive the books are and how the deal isn’t actually that great. Despite being 40% off, the book is still expensive and not worth your hard-earned money. We are hoodwinked into believing that things are different than they truly are. Whether it’s by propagandists, authority figures, ourselves, or even friends and family members, a lie is a convenient hook, line, and sinker to catch us in as the fish.

Truth be told, one of us alone can’t fix everything. You can’t fix a glass window that is broken in every way imaginable unless you get a team of people to repair it. Even then, that team needs to know what they’re doing. However, it also doesn’t do us any benefit to not question this - so I want you to ask these questions to yourself:

“If this doesn’t serve the purpose that I was hoping for/want/need it to, then what am I here for? And why should I believe that I can fix a problem that is hard to repair?”

You can escape or you can continue to fight the good fight. But neither will bring you the full resolution that you desire, as new challenges will always present themselves. At the end of the day, such things are inevitable.

Now, back to peeling the mask off. You likely understand that at an emotional level, processing this is incredibly painful, because it’s generally unexpected. And at a broader scale, this happens to everyone in some way in a different shape or form - the government didn’t do what I voted for, my job sucks even though they said there’s good benefits – you get the idea. Once this happens to you so often, though, it is easy to get desensitized.

On a personal level, desensitization occurs at the level of emotional indifference and numbness. You don’t feel much, if anything at all. In fact, if there’s one thing that the normalization of school shootings in America has taught us, it is that we are so desensitized to this kind of violence that we forget just how abnormal it really is. Horrors are committed against certain areas of the population, whether it’s the prison population being exploited for pennies on the dollar or the homeless not even being able to live properly in countless localities across the country. And yet, other than activists, nobody really cares beyond a temporary outrage, and that speaks volumes.

In fact, even if this is normal, what is normal anyways? Is this society normal? Is polluting the Earth at this level normal? Does normal really matter at the end of the day? Because wage theft is normal here, war crimes are normal around the world, and state violence is normal almost everywhere. In fact, I would argue that normalcy shouldn’t be the main concern - it’s whether this is right or justifiable.

Ethics is not something that a lot of us think about unless it’s a dilemma, the trolley problem, or a conflict. However, our world is severely lacking in it. Even the actions that seem so mundane in your own eyes can be argued as unethical by the other person (such as teasing them to the point where they’re annoyed with you but you’re just playing it off).

Overall, the images that we see on screens, images, and even the words in our personal lives don’t always tell the full story. Not even the words that can come out onto this page right now tell the full story. The horrors of the mask are so close to being fully revealed, but really it is only as far as the person furthest away from its presence can reach it.