Who you are and who you are in front of others are two different beings.
Those others can be anyone, be it strangers or neighbors or as close as friends and parents.
You know both of your faces, the true one and the masked one.
But they know only who you are in front of them. As it is masked and manufactured, it requires efforts to maintain it. Its maintenance is costly and painful.
You can’t think of anything without thinking about them reacting to it, challenging it, questioning it, judging it.
Let me ask you,
Why are you wasting so much energy on it?
Why do you wear that mask?
Why do you maintain that second image?
What is the fear within you?
How will they react, whether they accept it or not?
What if they mock you or laugh at you?
So what?
Having lived wearing a mask the majority of the time is not living.
One cannot call it a living. It’s compromising, compromising yourself, your true nature, your true being, true you, living in a box, compromising your freedom, compromising your true essence.
What is there to live if you are living with different sheaths every time?
By choosing to live with a mask, you are caring for the people and their judgment, the same people and judgment you neglect and curse when you are all alone with yourself.
But by having the need to maintain a second image
you are secretly respecting them or being afraid of them, their judgment, and their words.
It’s your choice now.
You can go on living like this,
but remember that you will never feel alive.
This is a trap. This is the world we live in, where everybody is compromising themselves, and their true nature, but no one asks, for what and for whom they are compromising the uncompromisable,
Which is life.
Everybody has sold themselves to this world. They compromised themselves and were lost to the mental tyranny of this world a long time ago when they were young.
Do not continue what you hate and feel is wrong.
Their forces will only be effective until you realize your true nature
and start living it.
It is the judgments that you are afraid of. You are in an actual sense not afraid of them, you are afraid of their looks, their words, their way, and their behavior toward you.
Behind these judgments lies ignorance. Your ignorance, ignorance of not knowing yourself and not knowing them. If you go deep enough you will understand and realize that the judgments are all of the minds, one who is getting feared or cared about it is not you but your mind.
It is the understanding of problems that liberates one from the problems.
It is the understanding of the true nature of things that liberates them from illusions and their effects.
That comes from understanding lasts longer
Is permanent and effective
Barely uttering words and repeating them doesn’t help.
Once you understand the game behind the game, you will be free, free from these situations and their effects. As you now understand not only the game but behind the scenes as well.
Then, you will just let your mind feel what it wants, you just watch and let it pass, just like any random thought and emotion it generates. You keep doing what you suppose to and let your mind do what it wants.
Let them say and think what their mind wants, and realize it’s not them saying, it’s their mind. Leave it there, take it as just another funny element in the game.
You go on living as you suppose to.