An Honest Discussion on Wearing Masks

It's hard for me to admit this, but I haven't always been the biggest fan of masks.

It all started long ago. There were a lot of people that said I was the perfect baby. Great smile. Big blue bug eyes. Laughter that could light up a room. Slept through the night. Perfectly timed poops. Life was good.

Unfortunately, I peaked in my infancy. As I graduated to toddler-dom, my life began to spiral out of control. For so long I had let the world see this perfect exterior, not realizing a crippling demon was being forged inside of me. One that would plague my life for years to come, and that still haunts me somewhat to this very day. That's right - I turned out to be a scaredy cat.

One bump in the night and I was wailing away. My mom loves to tell a story about how as a toddler I was literally afraid of my shadow, running away from it screaming on a vacation in Florida. It's the first story any (soon-to-be-ex) girlfriend hears upon meeting my family. My parents, sensing this weakness, decided to take the immersion therapy approach. Once a month, they would sneak into my bedroom and hide under my crib with a a different mask on. After a couple hours of crying and thumb sucking, I would eventually tire myself out. Around 3am, I'd be woken up to a horrifying clown or werewolf screaming in my face, nearly causing the world's first pre-kindergarten heart attack. My parents called it Shawn's Time of the Month.

As the years passed and I courageously pressed on into kindergarten, the stakes were raised. We would often drive about 30 minutes to visit my aunt and uncle on my Dad's side for holidays. They had three kids who were each about 5-10 years older than me and every bit as ruthless. They would take turns hiding behind doors with various "ugly old man" masks, shrieking obscenities in my face as I walked in for Thanksgiving Dinner. "Store was out of turkey, good thing the main course just arrived!" If you've ever been to Pittsburgh, you know every house within 20 minutes of the city has a creaky basement with a set of weights, a furnace, and the First Refrigerator Ever Made stocked with Iron City and Pepsi. All very dark and damp. Somehow I never learned my lesson when the relatives would offer me to go down to the basement and get myself a pop. You know how military/police officers "clear" a room before moving onto the next one, accounting for everyone involved? I did not do that. It would always turn out that the one cousin who was "sleeping" was actually hiding in the basement ready to threaten me with murder.

Elementary school brought on sleepovers. Sleepovers mean scary movies. Didn't matter if it was Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Mike Myers or the Michael Jackson Thriller video. If there was a mask, hiding was my task.

Middle school means first dates. The big tradition every Halloween for all the kids who weren't cool enough to start banging and doing drugs was Terrors by the Lake, a now-defunct scare house in the Pittsburgh North Hills. I had my mom drop off me to meet a date one time who I had no intention of touching. The Appetizer Bunny and Appetizer Zombies would swing by and examine all the patrons waiting in line before going into the house. I'm fairly certain they could smell fear and shared notes with the monsters inside. "Make sure you wait for the skinny kid covered in mustard stains dressed like a rapper. He'll be hiding behind a girl 6 inches taller than him." By dates end, I was sent screaming out the house by the masked maniacs wielding the (fake?) chainsaws through the maze. My date chose to stay and enjoy herself with the football players we met in line.

As I moved into high school and college, I decided it was time to grow up. Sports began to take hold of my life, as I spent a ton of time on the baseball diamond but never could quite look back at the catcher or umpire. Jim Carrey was one of my favorite actors and eventually I was able to support him throughout the entire first hour and 10 minutes of The Mask. I did have to turn it off once Dorian put the stolen mask on.

So anyway, I'm making progress just like everybody else who is working on themselves. Even now, you could say I'm wearing a mask of my own. That of course is a metaphor no one else has ever used before, so it might be confusing to some. I'm basically saying I'm putting on a rugged, manly version of myself that may not be truly who I am on the inside.

But aren't we all wearing some sort of mask? I think so. Maybe it's time to stop being afraid. To show our true selves, and to see others as they truly are. To live in a world without fear and pee-stained beds. So I'll propose one thing: Go to your nearest social media account (Facebook, Tinder, Twitter, Instagram, etc...), post the following hashtag, and let's start the revolution. We're all desperate to make progress and gain support, but we need leaders first: #PleaseTakeOffYourMask.