Your Are Perfect, Just As You Are

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 / Autoimmune Disease, Blog, Chronic Illness

What masks are you wearing to hide who you really are? Where in your life are you able to take this mask off and be your honest and vulnerable self? What gifts in life are you missing by believing you need to hide your authentic self and pretend to be something different.

This short dialogue expresses the sadness we all feel when we lose the sense of safety and freedom to be who we really are. It speaks to the human need to be heard by safe people who care. Perhaps as you read it it will remind you of the places you are hiding and the qualities of yourself that are begging to be celebrated rather than dismissed.

The picture in this posting says it all: YOU’RE PERFECT. You are perfect just as you are. Perfect in your weakness and your strength; in your places of knowing and places of not knowing; in your places of joy and places of despair; in your places of success and your places of failure. Being “grown up” does not imply a need to get it right all the time or never need to ask for help. It is simply about listening to your heart and trusting that you are enough, just as you are. If I forget this notion, I need only to watch our little grandsons dance, sing, be angry, be joyful, ask for help, not ask for help and everything else throughout their day. They live in the moment and have no masks to cover up the amazing little boys that they are!!!

The Masks I Wear

Don’t be fooled by me. Don’t be fooled by the face I wear.
For I wear a mask. I wear a thousand masks; masks I am
afraid to take off but none of them are me.
Pretending is an art that is second nature to me but don’t be fooled.
For God’s sake, don’t be fooled.

I give you the impression that I am secure and that all is
sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without.
That confidence is my name and coolness is my game.
That the water’s calm and I am in command.
And that I need no one. Don’t believe me. Please!

My surface may be smooth but my surface is my mask,
My ever varying and ever concealing mask.
Beneath lies no smugness and no complacence.
Beneath lies the real me in confusion, in fear, in aloneness
But I hide this. I don’t want anybody to know it.

I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear exposing them.
That is why I frantically create my mask to hide behind.
They’re nonchalant, sophisticated facades to help me pretend,
To shield me from the glance that knows.
But such a place is my salvation. My only salvation, and I know it.

That is if it is followed by acceptance and if it is followed by love.
It is the only thing that liberates me from myself
And my own, self built, prison walls.
I dislike hiding, honestly,
I dislike the superficial game I am playing
The superficial, phony game.
I’d really like to be genuine and me.
But I need your help.
I need your hand to hold,
Even though my masks would tell you otherwise.
That glance from you is the only thing that assures me
Of what I can’t assure myself.
That I am really worth something.

But I don’t dare tell you this. I don’t dare.
I’m afraid to. I’m afraid you will think less of me.
That you would laugh and your laugh would kill me.
I’m afraid that deep down I am nothing.
That I’m just not good and you will see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate and pretending game,
With a facade of assurace without and a trembling child within.
So begins the parade of masks, the glittering but empty
Parade of masks and my life becomes a front.
I idly chatter to you in sauve tones of surface talk
I tell you everything that is nothing and
Nothing of what’s everything, of what’s crying within me.

So when I am going through my routine,
Don’t be fooled by what I am saying.
Please listen carefully and hear what I’m not saying.
Hear what I would like to say but what I cannot say.

It will not be easy for you as long felt inadequacies
Make my defenses strong.
The nearer you approach me, the blinder I may strike back.
Despite what books say of people, I am irrational;
I fight against the very thing I cry out for.

You wonder who I am? You shouldn’t for I am
Every man and every woman you meet.
Don’t be fooled by me
Or at least by the mask I wear.

Author unkown.