On masking

• The Mask Comes Off When I Write - Jason Sanford

There are some amazing quotes in there.

Because of all that, I was taught to heavily mask. To hide who I was inside...And once I started school, I taught myself both consciously and unconsciously to mask even harder. After all, how many times does a kid need to be beat up or told there’s something wrong with them before they hide who they truly are?

I never actually got beat up for being who I was, but I'm pretty sure I learned to mask as soon as I started to interact with other children, or at the very least children other than my siblings and cousins. It's fine to be precocious and weird when you're a very small child interacting with adults. But peers will always put you in your place.

I no longer think the option of unmasking really exists for me. The skin on my face has grown over the mask, shaping to it. I still feel it — or them, really, because there are many masks — but I have no idea how to discard it. Except maybe in writing fiction.