Life is a Masquerade

                         No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself
                                and another to the multitude, without finally getting
                                          bewildered as to which may be the true.
                                           ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Its Halloween.. The time of year when one can put on a costume and become anything one desires, fierce and scary, seductive and sexy, strong and challenging, or angelic and sweet.  It is the time of year where we can pretend, just for one day to be something we are not. Or is it? People wears masks everyday of the lives, that only show the one side of themselves to their lover, their family, their coworkers, their boss, that they want them to see. Never ever revealing more then they want, when they want. Doesn't it then seem that everyday we wear costumes and maybe that Halloween is the one day a year we let some secret part of ourselves show?

If we continue to go through lives wearing a multitude of faces and being a multitude of different versions of ourselves, how can we then remember, exactly who we are? This isn't a male/female thing either, we all do it, everyday. Its not wonder really that not all of us suffer from multiple personalities when we live this way everyday. We are one person at home, one at work, one at the bar, how do we meld all of them into one? How do we even remember who we are exactly? Every person in our lives expect something from us, typically something different, and we try to accommodate, even when it is not something we wish to give. We need that acceptance from the people in our lives in order to feel OK.  Along with the different masks we wear, are different versions of reality that are so easy to get caught up in that at the end of the day it is almost impossible to figure out whats next or how we even got to this point.  We run the risk of losing ourselves and in the process never giving the people in our lives a chance to see us, the real us. Free of all masks, pretending and variations of the truth.  To do otherwise means, that we will sacrifice who we are, the good, the bad and the ugly, in order to fit some mold, that the people we are around have made for us.  We then stop living for ourselves and live completely for another. When did this become OK?  Wouldn't you prefer to be hated for who you really are, then loved and accepted for something you are not? The sad part even as I write that is, I know the answer, yes. Yes, most would prefer to be loved for something they are not, as they feel that maybe someday, if they pretend long enough, it will be true. Sadly enough, never is.

Isn't it time we all let the world know us for who we really are, before we forget ourselves?