The beauty of facades May 02 '06    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Books Mildred D. Taylor - Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: A Literature Unit From $8 Olivier Dunrea - Ollie From $7 The Bottom Line Be vulnerable sometimes... No, I am not about to launch into a discussion about architecture (phew) but waxing lyrical on my thoughts generally about the different faces people wear and why sometimes we can be oblivious to the true nature in front of us. Yes I’m a deep person, I rarely take things on face value and am often looking for secrets, veiled remarks, sly looks in everyone around me. Not to make myself sound like a mistrustful person but the older I get the more obvious it is to me that the masks one wears changes dramatically depending on the environment and the perception of who is watching. Let me ask you this, how well do you really know anyone? Do you explain ‘knowing someone’ as a passage of time, the rememberance of daily rituals, a genetic connection or is it somehow deeper than that? When you ask an acquaintance ‘how are you going?’ do you do so out of polite courtesy and then drift into your own meandering thoughts or actually wait to hear a response to see if it is the bland ‘yes good thanks’ and thus satisfying your need to be friendly but really not emotionally involved. I see the way most people always give the same answers by rote even if they are clearly upset and it always strikes me that for the most part I don’t think we really want to know how people are really doing in case of awkwardness or getting in too deep and not knowing what to say. Of course I’m not implying that when you buy your groceries that you should delve into the personal affairs of the person scanning the items, just that sometimes we get surprised at those who are closest to us being in crisis that we start questioning what it is we didn’t see, what comment went unnoticed. I have mentioned in a previous piece about my own on/off battle with depression and to this date even my ‘closest friends’ who professed to wanting to know why I was absent at work have yet to ask me if I’m ok. It puzzles me that it’s such a hard thing to work out facades and how to deconstruct them, is it politeness or fear which makes even the most blunt of characters decide it’s too difficult to ask someone about their true mental/emotional state? Perhaps I am just constructing a mask which is unfathomable to read from the outside so nobody can actually see, I’m not sure how others do perceive me most of the time. To me the relevance in the modern age is closely linked to social and mental disorders becoming rampant. We see people breaking down around us and for the most part all we can do is act shocked and wonder what we missed. Is it any wonder that many suicides go completely unnoticed and leave family and friends wondering how well they really knew them? It’s a sad case that many cries for help are so subtle that they are missed or passed off as a bad day or a case of someone simply being grumpy. I’m currently watching my best friend go through a painful and deteriorating marriage separation to which her ex husband once told me he felt nobody really ever asked him if he was coping, that him just saying ‘yes I’m fine’ was enough and people didn’t dig deeper to see what was going on behind the scenes. It made me wonder if men are sometimes the victims of silence as the old stereotype of having to cope makes men somehow more resilient to change or less likely to suffer a broken heart. I’m now watching a man going from intense mood swings, despair and utter selfishness all because for so long he wore a façade of being ok when things were falling apart around him. Human beings are such strange creatures, we hid secrets; our true selves for many reasons. The way you act with your best friend is infinitely different than the way you act with your lover, it makes us emotionally diverse and multi-faceted. All of the annoyances, the pain and secret desires each of us carry with us is divulged usually only to a select group. Being vulnerable is so terribly hard and scary that we wear our public face most of the time and show only what is necessary to get us through the day, but for once I would like to see more people take emotional risks, cut through the barriers to see what lies beneath…. It’s only when inquisitive minds ask and delve further than what that eyes can see that you may just make a difference to someone’s life, to break through the façade they show.

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