f*ck it, mask off
Written for Substack
I’ve realised recently that I’m into a very specific type of TV show. Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Revenge, Bridgerton - shows with an anonymous anti-hero, steeped in scandal, secrets and most notably, hidden identities. It comes as no surprise then that almost all these TV shows have had at least one iconic masquerade ball; a tradition where one’s true identity is hidden behind a beautifully adorned mask for majority of the evening, only to be revealed at the end of the night (usually accompanied by some equally dramatic major reveal in the story).
While much of the appeal of these TV shows comes from a perhaps slightly unhealthy penchant for elaborate schemes and problematic romance plots, it’s the unparalleled sense of calm and comfort I feel watching these shows that has me feeling introspective.
At a masquerade ball, the most exciting part of the evening is when the lights come on and the masks come off, leaving everyone free to be their true selves again. These instruments of disguise are easily discarded as today’s character becomes yesterday’s accessory.
There are however some masks that are much harder to shake off. As someone 27 years into life and only recently starting to piece together the puzzling nature of growing up without the context or language to understand neurodivergence, I have truly mastered the art of disguise.
To the untrained eye, one might mistake me for a well-adjusted twenty-something with their life relatively together. She’s got a stable-ish career going, a stunning group of friends, a cute apartment, hobbies and enough ‘will they, won’t they’ romance cliches to fill several episodes of any one of those aforementioned tv shows.
Yet underneath this carefully adorned life lies a girl who feels like a literal alien surrounded by co-workers who she can barely understand over the constant buzz of office conversations she can’t keep up with. Who’s inner saboteur likes to convince her after every day out with the girls that she’s said and done all the wrong things and it’s only a matter of time before the reality that she ‘doesn’t belong’ is revealed (as has happened many times before). Who only feels 100% safe in the haven of her own bedroom where she’s no longer being perceived.
One show that portrays this viscerally is Quinni’s character in Heartbreak High (someone who coincidentally also gets caught up in solving the mystery of an anonymous anti-hero - guessing this is a thing?) Point being, when you’ve mastered the art of appearing relatively ‘normal’ for the benefit of the people in your life, the daily effort that goes into crafting this image often goes unnoticed.
Masking has felt essential for survival in the world for so long, yet the older I get with that desire for real connections ever more present, I’ve realised just how many engraved marks those masks have left on my face. It’s almost impossible to trust anyone’s opinion of you when you wear a mask 90% of the time. Like the masquerade scene in Gossip Girl where Nate mistakenly confesses his love to Jenny, thinking she’s Serena. It would make no sense for Jenny to believe that Nate loved her when his words were intended for who she appeared to be on the surface.
There’s this ever present fear, in the same way Quinni’s character feels less likeable when she stops masking, that if you were truly yourself, would the people that loved the mask, love you as well?
Despite my inner saboteur’s impulse to say no, life always has a way of proving otherwise. It’s in finally finding a friendship group where you’re all so different that you feel safe to be your weird little self because there’s no pressure to ‘belong’. It’s meeting someone who understands your need to be reclusive sometimes or willingly listens to you yap about your special interests, even if it’s not their thing, just because they know how happy it makes you. It’s in the way you can always clock a fellow masquerader out in the wild and immediately breathe a sigh of relief because you just get each other.
Perhaps that’s why I feel so comforted by watching shows like Gossip Girl and Revenge. In the same way that the anonymous anti-hero is almost always hiding a complicated identity struggle or painful origin story, us highly-masked well-adjusted girlies of the world are often hiding a complicated relationship with ourselves underneath it all. It’s that classic trope of feeling like an outsider, looking in.
To my fellow masqueraders, I guess this is just my way of saying, I see you underneath all that curated identity. While life doesn’t always make it easy to just stop masking, at least in this small, insignificant part of the internet, it’s safe to say ‘f*ck it, mask off’.
