Masks in Redshift

This is my first month participating in the “IndieWeb Carnival” where the prompt for this month is “Masks, Identities & Cosplay”.

With age we learn to hold memories and thoughts at a distance. As if on a shelf across the room or in some other part of home. Age gives you the luxury of making furniture of history where you can safely stow away parts of your world. On such a shelf I keep my masks.

Masks I no longer need but once could not live without; being still liquid, in a harsh craggy world. They helped me stand back from the world where everything was always close, immediate, and sharp. The masks simulated distance. Behind the stolen expressions and borrowed mannerisms I could hold the world at arms length, and take a breath.

This was needed because life for me was repeated reinventions, transplantation, and the unique selection pressure of being the perma-outsider. My father’s job moved the family every three or four years. Life at home was stable, happy, and replete with books but the forced changes were hard. When we moved we moved cities, first within India then outside. Even within India the differences between cities are dramatic; the cultures so much that they are a shock to the system. Consequently the first two years were usually spent in orientation, and then in action.

In her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, historian Rebecca Solnit says of “people thrown into other cultures of through something of the anguish of a butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle […] of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as through it were as graceful as a flower blooming. […] The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.”

Against the forces of internal decay and the violence of transformations I had to learn to hold the world back. Sometimes halfway through transformation The change from orientation to action was an exchange of masks: from ones of protection to ones with powers. It was only in my 30s that I read Keith Johnstone’s Impro where he talks extensively about masks. But I was a natural user, not even requiring a physical mask. Looking back, liking the Jim Carrey movie, The Mask, may not have been just for the slapstick humor—but who knows?

So what are these masks? They were parts of me that were not quite me: mental posture, mannerisms, friend choices, that were purposeful to the stage I was in. They were personality packs. My first years in a new place were always the quiet kid personality. By the time I left, I was gregarious, confident, and often defiant — traits I have since learned are closer to my actual self.

About ten years ago, after my PhD and some wayfinding in life, I discovered that I could leave my shell and just be me. Shedding of the masks and their posturing allowed me to make and take up space in the world. I flexed my little leadership muscles, did audacious things, and figured out what I wanted out of life and what I enjoyed.

What followed was a bout of entrepreneurship, followed by a course correction back into science and technology.

Today, the masks are in some far off corner; accessible but not needed. I don’t mind being shy and unsure, though with the right people I enjoy talking and a good argument or two. Sometimes I do pick up a mask just to be in the world, sometimes to have fun – though I have lost practice.

I can wear masks to be many things. Mostly, though, I just enjoy being a tech-obsessed geek.