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...