escapism

Hidden

How do we confront adversity? One option is to adopt a disguise and stage a masquerade. Masks give us the power of becoming someone else. We all wear masks, literal or imaginary, which help disguise and protect our vulnerable real selves.

Not a bad life

Every day we put on our masks, and try to fit in. We hide our true emotions even with the people who love and accept us. At the end of the day when we are alone, our masks come off. Masks have eye cuts. Eyes are the only facial feature that masks cannot hide. Our eyes cannot hide our true feelings. Eyes speak louder than words. Eyes don’t lie. They reveal our thoughts and emotion. We tend to hide emotions by wearing a mask, to hide our face but pupils cannot lie.

Masks Off

When we wear a mask, we stand in resistance to our true self. We suffocate in our own masks. Over time masks fuse, distort, and change the self beneath them. The danger of wearing masks for too long is to lose our own true selves. There is no trace of the face the mask was covering, when the mask slips.

Set me free

The inborn dissatisfaction is as old as existence itself. When we feel uncomfortable with ourselves, we escape wherever and whenever we can. We escape from the workplace, from social pressure, expectations, and our past. Escapism helps us draw away from our everyday troubles and help us fantasize and avoid temporary, unpleasant truths that we must live with. Escapism evokes various terms like repression and distraction. Escapism should not be merely understood as turning the brain off and forgetting about reality. Instead escapism brings the viewer into a reality different than the one we live in. I believe the self is just a collection of masks, of all the roles we play. Behind the masked figures that surround us, there are people as vulnerable and real as ourselves.