The Mask

No, I am not talking about the Jim Carrey movie. There’s a stark resemblance between what I am writing, and the movie’s storyline, though.

In the movie, the main character finds a mask, and when they were that mask, it gives its wearer unrivalled confidence, and perhaps even a purpose or goal. And that purpose or goal is where that movie and my story go separate ways. The Mask’s purpose is to create havoc and exact revenge on those who thwarted the maskless person.

What I used my mask for, was to compensate for what I was lacking inside me, just without the havoc or revenge intent; just survival.

Those who remember me from before I transitioned, will, no doubt, remember a person who was annoyingly accurate, factual, in overwhelming quantities. Arrogant and aloof know-it-all has been used more than once to describe me, I am sure.
I still have some (or a lot? I am trying to unlearn using this mask) of that left over. It’s much more manageable than it was. For you, ‘they’ out there, and most importantly for myself.

I’m pretty confident that I’ve always had a strong interest in abstract systems, model representations of real life, and fact/logic-driven processes (deduction being my instinctively preferred approach). The best example I think I have for that is that my mother told me that, as an infant or toddler in my playpen, I skimmed the yellow pages (oh, gosh… do you remember those?!?!). But not like a toddler would do, like you’d expect a toddler to do. I’m sure you’re thinking of pages being torn, crumpled, chewed or drooled on maybe? and if pages were turned, that probably wouldn’t happen page by page. Instead, I turned single pages, and then followed the page’s columns top to bottom, and left to right. To then continue on the next page, and the next, like I was looking for that one address or name I knew I’d remember once I set my eyes on it.
Early “when I grow up I want to be a….” lists included cartographer (apathetically objective and sterile “model representation of reality”, anyone?) and air traffic controller.

If I got a dollar for each time someone referred to me as Mr. (then) or Ms. (now) Spreadsheet, I’d …. well, you know…

In my previous blog entry, I mentioned “I do not feel safe”. Several things happened in my formative years, divorce and budding gender dysphoria being the easiest to pinpoint, and as a result, rather than lashing out at the world around me, I turned to myself, and inside myself, or if you are biblically inclined, I basically started applying “Mortification of the Flesh”…

We can never really be sure of whether our memories are actually our memories, or that they happened that way, or even happened at all, but, in this last year and a half, I did a lot of introspection and learning in a very different way, with the help of others to guide me in that process. What I am writing about today, in the earlier post, and in a third one soon, is what I am learning about myself. How and why I do things the way I do.

In that previous entry, I talked about pain (or better yet, the refusal of it, the ignoring of it), and in the way all these puzzle pieces fit together, it all springs from that feeling of “I do not feel safe”. In these memories, and these are from a child’s perspective; when parents divorce, that child is not very likely to think “mommy and daddy don’t like each other anymore, they’ll go separate ways.” Instead, it’s more likely that child will – and I did- think: “I’ve done something to upset the parent (that leaves the fold), they’re now upset with me, don’t love me anymore, and show it by leaving.” And how could that child not think that way? Their belly button is literally the centre of the(ir) universe. If I did something so wrong that my father would be so upset they’d leave me, I’d obviously done something terrible to deserve that. So whatever it was, I’d better try to annihilate it, choke it, root it out. Even if I don’t remotely understand what I did, or why that could even be bad.

In the same timeframe, people around me started commending me on my brain power, my factoid knowledge…

Where my father didn’t see me (in my child’s mind), and some years later my first acting out my gender dysphoria resulting in a similar situation with my mother where I felt unseen by her too, I’d lost both parents and their supposedly unconditional love. That makes all of the floors be made of lava, with the stepping stones disappearing into the lava. Danger everywhere, and safe space nowhere.

But then there’s this brain thing; and to give you an example of how that worked out, when I was at my grandparents’ I’d literally be reading the encyclopaedia, and I’d jump from volume to volume, checking cross-references and rabbit-hole my way in. Just like we’d now do a wikipedia deep-dive, but I did that in the early ’80s.

People saw me, and applauded, and appreciated all of that effort, and I think that became my drug; I sought it more, and expressed it more, which then triggered searching for it more….

Until people didn’t anymore. With me having shut down any and all of the emotional and physical input and output, I sometimes say with a bitter smile that when I’d be asked how I felt, I’d answer with: “well, rule X says this, and it’s raining”. Just regurgitating facts and empirical (half)truths, instead of showing the discomfort or pain I undeniably was in. Back in that child’s mind that feels unsafe and even betrayed (or is it the other way around?): “I did that, and see what it got me…. Nope, not doing that again. Ever.” is played on eternal repeat. And that voice kept going, and going.

That’s how I started wearing that mask. And coupling that with how my brain functions, I started using all brain capacity to game out every possible scenario I could think of. And as we do with gaming out scenarios, we tend to typically focus more on the negative ones than on the positive ones; but that at least gave me one thing that I couldn’t get elsewhere, a sense of safety. Not because I was safe, but because I think I managed to get ‘most likely outcomes’ and could anticipate and course-correct if, when, and as soon as necessary.

Ask me to make a proposal on how to improve a process? I’ll come up with a tome-sized volume of scenarios and outcomes, and then work my way back from there, to end up with the best course of action. Where all that people would ask of me is to write a simple paragraph with a thought on it.

That mask has kept me – lulled into a sense of – safe, but it was never actually being safe; I just took very drastic measures to avoid feeling unsafe(r than I already felt). <- There’s a bit of an Inception going on there, like lucid dreaming, or feeling while feeling has been deactivated.

It’s hard to let go of that mask, but it is time to do so. Or, to actually use a pop culture metaphor that is actually much dearer to me and my story, that mask very much represents what the feather represented to Dumbo…

I guess I should have started with that, and written it from that perspective; the little deserted elephant that clings to a feather for dear life.