I’ve been thinking about masks.

Not the physical kind. Not the pandemic kind. metaphorical kind.

The one we carry around every day.

The version of ourselves presented to the world.

I suspect most people assume a mask exists to hide who we really are. To deceive. To keep people out.

Mine doesn’t work like that.

People often describe me as open. They’re right.

I’ll talk about my stroke if you ask.

I’ll talk all day about rugby.

I’ll talk about the AFO attached to my leg and the defibrillator attached to my left tit .

I’ll happily tell stories from my old career, stories from all stages of rehabilitation, stories from life now.

I’ve never been particularly private.

Yet despite being open, not everyone gets full access.

That sounds contradictory but I’ve said before I know I am .

People know things about me. Sometimes people know a lot of things. Yet there are people who know intimate details of my life and still don’t really know me at all.

For years I assumed those two things were the same.

Openness.

Closeness.

Visibility.

Being known.

They’re not.

The realisation took a while

If Someone asks about the AFO.

Sometimes the answer is simple and short:

“It’s a long story. I’d rather not.”

Other times the answer takes an hour.

The same question.

A completely different response.

The difference isn’t the story.

The difference is the person asking.

Trust is a strange concept. Most people assume it arrives through familiarity. Time served. Years known.

It isnt always

Some people I’ve known for many years still only know the public version of me.

Others seem to arrive with a key

They ask the right question in the right way .

Listen properly to my answer.

Ask a sensible follow-up

And before I realise what’s happened, the mask lowers slightly.

Never removed.

Just lowered metaphorically to eye level

Enough for them to glimpse something underneath.

The odd thing is that I don’t think the mask exists for the reasons people assume.

The mask developed after my stroke.

Before then I knew who I was.

.

My career made sense.

My body made sense.

My future made sense.

Then suddenly nothing made sense .

People would ask questions I couldn’t  or didnt want to answer;

What are you doing now?

How are you?

What’s next?

Who are you?

The problem was I wasn’t entirely sure.

The old answers no longer fit and the new ones hadn’t arrived yet.

At the time, the mask wasn’t about deceiving anybody.

It was protection.

A way of  finding  my safety in a world that expected certainty when I had very little of it myself.

A placeholder while I worked things out.

Years later,  parts of it remain.

Not because I’m hiding. I’m

Too vocal.

Not because I’m ashamed. I’m not.

Not because I’m pretending. I don’t need to.

It remains because I’ve learned there is a difference between being seen and being known.

Some people get stories.

Some people get facts.

Some people get humour.

Some people get the version of me that feels comfortable in a room.

A much smaller number of people get access to the things underneath.

The fears.

The uncertainty.

The parts still figuring themselves out.

The bits that don’t fit comfortably into anecdotes.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always struggled with the idea that authenticity means complete openness.

It doesn’t .

Authenticity isn’t giving everybody unrestricted access.

It isn’t removing every barrier.

It isn’t broadcasting every thought.

Sometimes authenticity is simply being honest about where my barriers stand.

The mask still exists.

It lowers for some people.

Occasionally it slips.

Sometimes I realise I’ve revealed more than I planned.

Sometimes I pull it back into place before anyone notices.

Sometimes I don’t.

Most people will never see it.

A few people do.

An even smaller number know why it’s there.

And perhaps that’s the point.

The mask was never built to hide me from the world.

It was built to protect me while I learned how to live in the world again.

It was never hiding or pretending it was safety and survival