Please hear what I'm not saying...

Please Hear What I’m Not Saying

~Anonymous

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 that I am afraid to take off and none of them are me.

Pretending is an art that’s second nature with me

But don’t be fooled; for God’s sake don’t be fooled.

I give you the impression that I’m secure

That all is sunny and unruffled with me within as well as without,

That confidence is my name and coolness my game, that the water’s calm and I’m in command, and that I need no one.

But 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, no complacence. Beneath dwells 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 weaknesses and fear exposing them.

That’s why I frantically create my masks to hide behind. They’re nonchalant, sophisticated facades to help me pretend, to shield me from the glance that knows. But such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only salvation, and I know it. That is, if it’s followed by acceptance, and if it’s followed by love. It’s the only thing that can liberate me from myself from my own self-build prison walls…from the barriers that I so painstakingly erect. That glance from you is the only thing that assures me of what I can’t assure myself, that I’m really worth something.

But I don’t tell you this. I don’t dare. I’m afraid to. I’m afraid you’ll think less of me, that you’ll laugh and your laugh would kill me. I’m afraid that deep-down I’m nothing, that I’m just no good and you will see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate, pretending game with a façade of assurance without and a trembling child within. So begins the parade of masks, the glittering but empty parade of masks, and my life becomes a font. I idly chatter to you in suave tones of surface talk. I tell you everything that’s nothing and nothing of what’s everything, of what’s crying within me. So when I’m going through my routine do not be fooled by what I’m saying; please listen carefully and try to hear what I’m not saying. Hear what I’d like to say but what I cannot say.

I dislike hiding. Honestly. I dislike the superficial game I’m playing, the superficial phony game. I’d really like to be genuine and me. But, I need your help, your hand to hold even though my masks would tell you otherwise.

It will not be easy for you. Long felt inadequacies make my defenses strong. The nearer you approach me the blinder I may strike back. Despite what books say of men, I am irrational; I fight against the very thing that I cry out for. You wonder who I am. You shouldn’t…

For I am everyman

And everywoman

Who wears a mask.

Don’t be fooled by me.

At least not by the face I wear.

So, as for myself, I dare you to continue to look past the masks and to face the broken places of your heart and life. Allow yourself to go there. Baby steps. Your crushed spirit is a serious wound that God will heal by his hand (through whatever means) and in His time. I will love you through it.

“I am more convinced than ever that if our inner brokenness is ever to be made whole, and if we are to ever sing again, we will need to deal with the issues of the evaluators and the affirmers in our lives. I also firmly believe that the need for affirming one another is crucial to our process of becoming real, not phony or hypocritical, people of God. Affirming brings authenticity and credibility to our Christianity as it is lived day by day. I must be affirmed, and I must be an affirmer to others. Otherwise I miss one of the main concepts of the New Testament—to love one another and to bear one another’s burdens.” ~Balcony People