“My fear was to remove my mask would be to risk insanity.” This is a line in the book “Art is the way of Knowing” by Pat B. Allen. It seems if you have enough consciousness to know you are wearing a mask, if you are tired of seemingly being two people, one you seem to control and the other out of control, this dropping of the mask would be easy. What I have come to find out is the mask is the ‘nice’ one and the other the beast. A thirsty beast, relentless, cunning and deceitful, never content, and forever bursting into normal days to upend them, sort of like a bratty child perhaps a neglected one. We are fearful when we drop the mask of nice, we are left being the neglected abused child, dirty, soiled, confused, screaming, not breathing, hyper-ventilating, breathless, too messy to look upon by others. Way too hard to listen to, too horrific is our tale. We fear being too yucky to bear, too ruined to fix, broken into a million pieces never to return to wholeness. Yet, it is by actually dropping the mask of pretending we are normal that we find the wounded one. We have to be the brave one to sit with us awhile. The fear that we will never ever find normal again is real and present, but we are also faced with attending the broken child. It seemed to me, that I had to let the future go on hold, while going backwards to gather into me a little girl who was for so long left alone, while I was busy pretending she wasn’t there, unbeknownst to me. The fear is we will get left broken, unfixable, twisted and insane. And once we drop the mask of pretending otherwise, we will be left exposed, exposed and not showing our best side, but our worst. It took literally one second to agree with the statement that, “she said grandpa touched her”, one tiny little second admitting that her statement and my body agreed, that one small moment had the momentum to crash my normal mask. Beneath it lay years of unknowing. My body shook like a volcano inside, the fear was cursing wildly throughout my body, gripping me and wrapping itself everywhere. In an instant my world changed, my past too would never be the same, a future was uncertain at best. Just to just survive the news took all my strength. Made to walk into fear, terror and the unknown, while being so messed up your self seems madness now. I have no real idea of how this all managed to work itself out. How I managed to not only walk about, do normal things while in this state, but to hold on to reality. Holding on to reality when reality is a mess is not an easy task. Your reflexes almost seem to want to look away, to do anything but look, than to deal with something so large and so out of control. My mask of being who I thought I was for 46 years lay broken on the ground, useless and hopeless. I was not that, and I surely didn’t want to be just another victim of a man who abused girls, a girl who is broken, with no memories, knowing that all she knew, she had no idea of the truth, fatherless, I became no one. I recall not wanting to be his descendent, or even carrying a name. I just wanted to be a no one, attached to nothing, nameless, faceless, past-less. I guess free of the mess that lay beneath the mask of normal. In the book Art is a way of Knowing, she suggest that if you are seeking to know, you best take care of yourself in your ordinary life. To eat, sleep and work regularly, so you have a set routine to balance the imaginal work. For me that means going backward in your mind to sort out the details that I had wrong, I had imagined many things that were not true. Like imaginary friends! So while I worked to put realness to my imaginary people, I tried to stay as normal as possible. Which is funny now, for I had no idea what normal was. My husband said, “What is normal, isn’t that different for all of us?” And I agree, there are no rules to get you through this process. To keep the balance I sought out Nature. I walked along the river, I sat for hours inside watching birds at our bird feeder, it was a waking meditation when my life had too many problems to work on. I was blessed in having a one- day a week job, a husband who supported me, and lots of space to heal. Little by little, and piece by piece I healed, and I became whole, a whole new little girl, imperfect, but for me perfect. A broken bowl glued back together is stronger than the original, is what I had read once. I would have to agree. I do know that of myself. I am stronger now then ever before. It is true, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! I guess I now fear normal pretend masks over what lays beneath. Beneath is the truth.
