I have spent the better part of the last year getting to know myself better and removing a lot of my societal programming to get to the core of who I am. The more I let go of all of those beliefs that I learned and let rule my life, the freer I find myself feeling. I focused for a while on the concept of authenticity and just being present in the moment in all things that I do. As someone that has always had a tendency to disassociate from reality when I felt uncomfortable, this has been an interesting spiritual and philosophical experience to say the least.
What did I find underneath all of those masks and layers of identities that I created over the thirty years leading up to all of this? I found my self, but how does anyone really describe a self? I feel the greater connection that we all spiritually share and I do believe in some higher consciousness, which some may call God or love or whatever resonates with them. I feel that after all of this and stripping myself down to my core that the concept of acting and wearing masks is still there, but it's more like seeing everyone as a reflection of that same core self and that we're all just playing our parts in life.
I feel that in the end, we have little control over anything beyond our own acceptance of reality. We can't make ourselves have desires or want to be something that we have no desire to be. It doesn't mean we have to act on all of our thoughts or give in to all of our desires. Some thoughts and desires are just unhealthy and harmful to our own inner peace and being aware of that allows us to let go of them or not act on them. There is no need to detach from the roles we're all playing at any given time if we just accept them as that. It seems to me that our judgments of our own roles get projected onto others to give the illusion of blame and creates victim mentality.
We seem to all have many parts and roles that we must play over our lives and sometimes they overlap. I find that letting go of the resistance and judgment of myself and others allows me to shift the roles or "masks" more easily and it's much more simple to just be authentic. Authenticity seems less about removing masks and more about consciously choosing and being aware of what mask we wear at what time. Sometimes it's just necessary to play our parts in others' lives and not be judgmental of ourselves or them to enjoy life as the experience that it ultimately is in the end. Namaste.