Our Masquerade

What do you wear to a masquerade? Elegant ball dresses, elaborate costumes and of course, the mask – the façade, the disguise, the deception – all to prevent the revelation of the identity of the party guests. Can you see yourself all dressed up for the masquerade, ready for the pretense; but what is behind your clever mask?

My hope is that it will become evident to you in this book that the meaning of the word masquerade is not about a party. The meaning of the masquerade here is about learning in life to cover¬¬ and hide. And we girls are really proficient at hiding and covering who we are. How do we do that? In our choices and behavior patterns. Here are a few I would like to suggest:

• Comparing ourselves to others

• Performing for acceptance

• Captive to Perfectionism

• Dealing with issues of Control

• Stuck in Idealism

Could any of these be in your life? If so, I want to assure you that you are not alone. These are behaviors that we may not want to admit we succumb to, yet we can find ourselves entangled in their trappings, hiding who we are.

I hope to be able to help you come to understand your hiding places and why I call them “the heavy burdens of a woman’s soul.” You see, I can write about them with insight, because I have experienced and carried all of these burdens in my life. Why did I do that? Because I have fears of inadequacy and rejection, and I live in the same demanding places that you do. We live in a world with endless pressures on a woman to find an “acceptable” identity: how we look; what we have or don’t have; how we perform or how we fail to perform. It’s all about our thoughts of who we think we “truly” are, and how we think others see us; leading us to question our value and worth: “What if we are not enough? What if we don’t have what it takes? What if we fail to measure up?” Fear and shame are lurking in those questions, and that motivates us to cover and hide. We create masks and live behind the emotional “walls” we have built around ourselves for protection from the probing thoughts of others, and maybe even our own thoughts of ourselves. Do I have worth? Can I be loved? Am I adequate? As I look at social media, I often wonder about the masquerade. What is really behind the faces there? What is the truth about their identity? And what is the basis of the thoughts of themselves?

When I Google-search the word masquerade, I find that it is “a false show, a pretense, an act, a disguise, and a deception.” The Cambridge English Dictionary defines masquerade as “a behavior that is intended to prevent the truth about something unpleasant or not wanted from becoming known.” I’ve lived this type of masquerade with masks I created to protect myself from “being seen” – fearful that someone would look too closely at me and find little of value there. My masquerade became deceptively “useful” as part of the “safe place” emotional walls I built around myself. The protective “walls” were made up of the many “bricks” I had created and assembled to wall myself off from my feelings of inadequacy, shame, guilt, fear and rejection. Masks and brick walls: my hiding place. Do you think you might be hiding too?

I have learned that by hiding and living in any one or all of these burdensome choices and behavioral patterns of perfectionism, idealism, comparison, control, or performing to be accepted, the result will be that we are robbing ourselves from experiencing what we earnestly long for in our female souls: for rest, for hope, for joy, for peace and for an unwavering enduring love and acceptance. I want to show you in the following pages just what you are doing to yourself and to your relationships, especially those you love, by choosing these burdensome patterns, with their walls and masks. Rather than remain trapped inside Our Masquerade, let’s discover How and Why we’ve learned to hide; and Where we could be “hiding” as we cope with life. Let’s confront the lies of our “distorted” inner identities which steal our confidence and provoke us to remain hidden. And let’s find the pathway out to healing, escape and confidence in an extravagant grace which brings about radical changes with life-altering results.