The masks we wear to hide from ourselves

Just to get this out of the way up front, the masks I'm referring to are a kind of behavior and perhaps a mental attitude that goes with it.  For example, a sycophant employee will agree with everything the boss says.  That same employee may not be nearly so agreeable when at home and away from work.   That sort of thing is the subject of this post, though the focus will be on other motives for wearing masks.  This post is not about the face masks we need to wear in public to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Sometimes we wear such a mask when we read fiction, imagining ourselves as one of the characters in the story.  In this week's New Yorker there are four very short stories by Kafka, previously unpublished.  They seem especially appropriate for now, living under the pandemic. I especially liked the third one, which seems to capture my current thinking quite well, even if the particulars are different. The enigmas are of the same nature.  What to want now and how to negotiate for what we want remains a puzzle.

I have several different aspects to my personality.  One of those is to worry excessively, often about things entirely outside my control.  When I was an administrator I did this with some frequency and the stress of it ate me up on the inside.  I didn't know how to cope and put on a lot of weight in those years.  (It didn't help that I had to give up jogging several years earlier because my knees couldn't take it anymore.  I should have embraced walking then, but didn't till much later.)  Earlier in life, this same part of my personality led to two separate bouts of depression as a teenager.  I later learned some coping strategies about avoiding depression.  I'll return to that idea in a bit.

Before that I want to note that everyone has dark aspects to their personalities.  They won't all manifest in the same way, but we are not just our better angels, even if on occasion we behave as if we were.  So, it is my belief that all of us embrace ways for which those dark aspects won't manifest.  This is done by the wearing of masks, as in the title of my post.

Early in May I wrote a post, Fending Off Depression - My Take.  The intended audience for that post was current college students and also recent grads, each of whom is facing a very tough job market.  Implicit in the post, I assumed that we'd get the pandemic under control  eventually, but the economic consequences would persist well after that happened.  So I was writing about dealing with the economic consequences, especially for kids (in my world you're a kid till you're 35) who are living with mom and dad rather than venturing out on their own.  I didn't anticipate that the pandemic itself would be a possible source of depression, at least for the type of kids I saw in the class I taught last fall.

Later in May I stumbled into a wonderful and charming way for me to wear a mask.  I orchestrated a mini high school reunion via a Zoom call with friends in Facebook who went to Benjamin Cardozo HS and who graduated in 1972.  A few of them invited other friends, also in our graduating class.   After that call I did a few one-on-one calls with some of the participants.  But with one, I had been on a date with her in 12th grade, we instead had a very lengthy email exchange.  It was on a variety of topics, but part of it was about a "what if?" talking it through with a romantic touch, when we both were going through those awkward teenage blues that Bob Seeger sung about.  I found it captivating.  Now, with both of us 65, that our teen years are still such an object of fascination, and that we could discuss it openly was wonderful.

This conversation led me to a life question for which I still don't have a good answer.  As an adult I've had conversations with many women, though outside of close friends and family almost all of them had work at the university as how I got to know these women, and work often was at least part of the conversation.  In junior high and high school I had hardly any of these conversations.  In high school, particularly senior year, there was a lot of hanging out as a group, and I knew girls in that context.  But a one-on-one conversation with a girl was quite rare for me.  Why was that?  And had such conversations happened, would they be just like the one-on-one conversations I did have with close friends, all of whom were boys?  Or would they be different because the boy-girl thing would intrude in some way? 

As that email conversation was winding down I started another conversation with a 7th grade classmate whom I understood was having some life struggles.  I didn't know her well in 7th grade but I naively thought I could be of some comfort to her simply by schmoozing online.  This time we used Facebook Messenger instead of email.  My first attempt at contact failed to produce an ongoing conversation, but she did respond that what I sent was sweet in some way.  I had and still have a hunger for communication where the tone is sweet and the messages give the recipient a warm feeling.

A couple of weeks later I tried again and this time we connected.  I took delight in the back and forth we had and would spend considerable time thinking about how the conversation now tied into the common experiences we had in 7th grade.  Eventually, this brought me to a new self-understanding that I wrote about in a recent post, When Boys Had To Wear Ties To School.  And it occurred to me that sending silly but sweet messages, in particular sharing bad jokes, had some of the same elements.  It's a combination of performance/non-performance, where the aim is to evoke the right sort of reaction.  This was the mask I had wanted to wear.

When my kids were little I had similar warm feelings when playing with them, reading a book to them at night, or watching a movie with them in our living room.  Family life was full of warmth.  But the kids grow up and want to hang out with their own friends.  Eventually they move out of the house and our family communication is much more adult now.  My wife, who is still working for the university, occasionally expresses some of those child-like warm feelings, but more so on the weekends, and then they are fleeting, as she needs her downtime to restore herself.  I, however, am retired and have a craving for this sort of interaction.  Where might I find such interactions?  It seems with women I knew in public school, who want something similar.

I came to believe I could fill my day with sweet communications and the thoughts those messages engendered in me.  It was living in a dream world, no doubt.  Then, a few days ago the bubble burst.  The bad news, about the coronavirus in the U.S., as demonstrated in this table from the CDC, which I compulsively view at least once a day, coupled with the bad economic news, and the apparent stupidity of so many to cause these outcomes, got to me. The dark side of me appeared with a vengeance.  I didn't want to share these dark thoughts with anyone, though I'd like to know how others are maintaining their equilibrium in the present circumstances, and maybe understanding that also requires us to express our doubts and fears.  (My rhyme from yesterday is a very mild form of such expression.)

The news is likely to remain grim for a while.  Can I return to where my better angels take over and the sweet messages become a large part of my day?  I don't know.  It's been my experience that by writing about what's bothering me, I can get it out of my system and move onto something else.  But now we're on a pace for more than a million new cases per month.  The election seems far away.  The inauguration even further.  I need a coping strategy for the interim.  Wearing a mask might be part of it, but I don't think it can be the whole solution.  I wonder if others are thinking along the same lines and, if so, what they have come up with.

Maybe I need to stop reading Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times.   Economics is the dismal science.  Instead, we need upbeat science fiction.