Whenever one is forced to alter his outward behavior for the benefit of others, one finds himself submitted to the persona as though it suddenly became his master; and as a demonstration of this relationship between the persona and the person, our persona creates a spectacle which is meant to be seen. Think of the 21st century woman walking through the mall with excessive makeup, long eyelashes, straightened hair, underclothes that strategically accentuate her body, tight clothes, and a long and lazy stride. She wants to be seen. And what's worse? She only wants to be seen. Men approach her only to be turned away by her comments of a delusional perception of power, and she walks away. At the end of her shopping trip, she leaves the mall with the same things with which she entered, and only with an inflated ego. I once asked one of the men that approached her, “If you need to be seen, what are you hiding?” That question was all it took to make him look elsewhere.
But it is an important question. If you need to be seen, what are you hiding? What is it that you despise of yourself so much that you would do anything you can think of to draw attention away from who you are to how you look . . . and then change that into something so preposterous that it's no more real than the mirage of water on the concrete in the summer?
As Chester Bennington once wrote, “It starts with one.” We change only one thing about ourselves because we don't like it, and it's always superficial, then that one thing leads to the next, then the next, then the next, and before long we can't even recognize ourselves. In the same song, “Thing's aren't the way they were before, you wouldn't even recognize me anymore – not that you knew me back then, but it all comes back to me in the end.”
“It all comes back to me in the end.” The question always returns to who you are underneath the mask, when Toto has pulled back the curtain to reveal you. Your mask never stays in place for long. You catch what you intend to – a man, a woman, an associate, an acquaintance – and you think you can fool them forever. But, because you have buried your self-hatred under layers of deception, convincing yourself that you know who you are, your persona now shows the cracking of the synthetic materials that indicate to those around you that you are not who you want them to think you are, and they always seem to ask you about it.
The curtain is pulled back, the strap on the mask is broken. Now we see you for who you are. How lucky you were to have had two faces, but now both are truly ugly. Your mask will always be revealed as just that. The very thing you hide screams out for your attention . . . and ours. But because you ignore it, it gets bigger. It grows, getting heavier and more aggressive with each passing minute. As it grows, its scream becomes louder, stronger, more intense, until finally all you can hear is that scream. You can't hear anything else, and its size obstructs your view. Now everyone else, to you, is suddenly a threat. Strike that thing down!
Kill it now! It only threatens you because you ignore it. But when you look at it, you discover that it only disgusts you. Kill it. Then you will be free.
