Please Hear What I'm Not Saying by J Heatherly

Please Hear What I'm Not Saying

Don't be fooled by me.
Don't be fooled by the face I wear. For I wear a mask, a thousand
masks, masks that I'm afraid to take off, and none of them is me.

Pretending is an art that's second nature with me, but don't be
fooled, for God's sake don't be fooled. I give you the impression
that I'm secure that all is sunny and unruffled within as well
as without, that confidence is my name and coolness my game,
that the water's calm and I'm in command, and that I
need no one. But don't believe me. Please!

My surface may seem smooth but my surface is my mask, my
ever-varying and ever-concealing mask. Beneath lies no
smugness, no complacence. Beneath dwells the real me in
confusion, in fear, in aloneness. But I hide this.
I don't want anybody to know it.

I panic at the thought of my weaknesses and fear exposing
them. That's why I frantically create a mask to hide behind.
They're nonchalant, sophisticated facades to help me pretend,
To shield me from the glance that knows. But such a glance is
precisely my salvation, my only salvation, and I know it.
That is, if it's followed by acceptance, and if it's followed
by love. It's the only thing that can liberate me from myself
from my own self-built prison walls, from the barriers I so
painstakingly erect. That glance from you is the only
thing that assures me of what I can't assure myself,
that I'm really worth something.

But I don't tell you this. I don't dare. I'm afraid to. I'm
afraid you'll think less of me, that you'll laugh, and your
laugh would kill me. I'm afraid that deep-down
I'm nothing, that I'm just no good, and you will
see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate pretending game with a
facade of assurance without and a trembling child within.
So begins the parade of masks, the glittering but empty
parade of masks, and my life becomes a front.

I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk.
I tell you everything that's nothing, and nothing of
what's everything, of what's crying within me.

So when I'm going through my routine, do not be fooled
by what I'm saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear
what I'm not saying, hear what I'd like to be able to say,
what for survival I need to say but what I can't say.

I dislike hiding. Honestly. I dislike the superficial game
I'm playing, the superficial phony game. I'd like to be
genuine and me. But I need your help, your hand to
hold even though my masks would tell you otherwise.
It will not be easy for you. Long felt inadequacies make
my defenses strong. The nearer you approach me the
blinder I may strike back. Despite what books say of
men, I am irrational, I fight against the very thing that
I cry out for. You wonder who I am? You shouldn't, for
I am every man and every woman who wears a mask.
Don't be fooled by me. At least not by the face I wear.