How Stealth Is Your Mask?

“You are hard for me to paint, Angela.

Always you wear a mask to hide the soul within you.”

Gino, Street Angel (1928)

Angela, Charlie, Lisa, Richard. It doesn’t make any difference what our name is, many of us wear a mask to hide the souls within us. And we do that for a very serious reason: Shame of who we are inside.

My shame of being unacceptable and unlovable kept me behind a stealth mask for many years. Even to this day I still wear a mask. It’s just much more see-through than it used to be. But the stealth mask was essential to a younger me. I truly believed that I was so unacceptable of a person that no one could possibly like me. On the surface people might think I was nice enough. I could certainly project the good boy image. But I was petrified that if they ever got underneath my mask, they’d reject the real me. And I greatly feared it would mean the emotional—and maybe the physical-- death of me.

So I wasn’t too different from Angela in the 1928 film Street Angel. Angela, who lives in Naples, also has great shame about who she is: a very poor young lady who must prostitute herself to save her mother. Angela’s mother is on the verge of death and needs medicine to survive, but they have no money. Desperate, Angela goes begging on the street, but no one will help her. She then offers herself to various men and when they don’t take her seriously, she attempts to steal some cash. Unfortunately, she’s caught and sent off to prison for both theft and prostitution. She’s able to escape from the police on the way to the jail, however, and she flees Naples.

Angela ends up in a circus road show where she meets a young painter named Gino. Angela is always tough as nails around Gino because she feels a strong attraction to him and she is utterly ashamed of who she is. She can’t possibly allow herself to fall in love with Gino, who has a strong attraction to her. If Gino got under her mask and into her soul, he’d eventually find out her unhappy truth: That she is a wanted woman on the lamb from the law. So she feels she must wear her mask to keep Gino at bay, and when the mask doesn’t work, she uses rude behavior to push Gino away.

For some reason, telling Gino the truth is never on the table for Angela. It never occurs to her that if Gino really loves her, he will believe that she is really a beautiful person inside. And that he will understand that she only did what she did to save her mother’s life. But Angela is never strong enough to confide the truth to Gino. Her fear of rejection is too strong because she isn’t able to love and approve of herself. She’s too reliant on what society and everyone else thinks about her. She's given her personal power away.

How often are we caught in the same trap? Well today is the day to start getting out of that trap. Realize this: The truth is that inherently EVERYONE IS GOOD. Everyone is worthy. Everyone is loveable. Everyone has value. Past mistakes, including all forms of behavior, cannot rob anyone of his/her inherent goodness. And there are no exceptions to this!

The more we realize this and come to love ourselves better, the less dependent we will be on wearing our masks to gain approval and acceptance from others. In the end of Street Angel, Gino learns the truth about Angela and he loves her anyway. He doesn’t abandon her. And no one who is really meant to be a precious part of our lives will ever abandon us either when they know all of our truth; nor will we abandon them when we know all of their truth. This is what REAL, unconditional love is all about.