May be people wear masks to be and to feel the way they’d like themselves to be. At least for a while. Some try to live in the fleeting moments that life provides them with. Some want a second chance, one in which they are different from their past selves. Masks help provide that respite, even if it turns out to be brief. Because people don’t provide that chance. In these times giving a chance, forgiveness, kindness, empathy… None of these are virtues anymore. Masks is how one makes himself again. All over again. It is a chance that some give to themselves to be what they’d like to be? If to hide behind a look, then that. If to look a certain way, then that. No one knows how far their moment of unmasking is – the eventuality. In the present the narrative must be likable. So the mask.
If Anon may risk it with poetry, then I have W.B. Yeats through these elegant lines from, of course, ‘The Mask’ –
“I would but find what’s there to find,
Love or deceit.”
“It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what’s behind.”
Contested Realities 