TAKING OFF THE MASKS

Lied? Even if it was unintentional, everyone has told lies to other people. Everyone has tried to live with some sense of honesty, as a value to respect, to hold dear, to want to aspire to be, trustworthy. There is always the time when you want to hold back some information, to let people believe or continue to believe in what they feel more comfortable with, rather than telling the truth, or outright lying to hide some facet of your life. You don't live in a bubble. There is no way possible that you can go through life with no blame, or no innocence.

You can not tell me that there is nothing that you did that would ever be so innocent that if your "truth" was out there, people would not look differently... as if there is no longer anything that you say or have said that was really true. Even if you gave all you could... nothing could undo that lie. It happened. You have to move forward. You have to recognize that you are not blameless, even if your "truths" are less drastic, or less important in your eyes... there is something that you know that is true in all the rest you know about someone, that you can definitely overlook the lie. You just have to. Or you will continue to have trust issues, because EVERYONE has a dark side. Everyone has been untrue in some way. Everyone is a jerk in their own way. Everyone can be a bitch sometimes. Everyone can walk away and not give another thought to it or to the bond that was made... thinking they took the moral high road, but that doesn't help you to know that there is a lot of trust that someone puts into telling you their truth someday... That in order to reveal the truth, one has to have complete faith that you will forgive them. And one has to know the risk of losing something so dear to them, that the truth should not be as significant, or life shattering. In order to share that truth, someone has to know that the bonds you have are real to them. And someone has to pray that you will be able to forgive, and to trust that there is more to them than the truth that was hidden from you.

For whatever reason, we all hide our "faces" from plain view. We all want to see an ideal. We all have a mask on. We all hide. Therefore we all show only that which is appealing to others. Sometimes, we show too much of ourselves, and that often puts people off. But when you can accept that of others, what they are really about, the transparent part, and they can accept you despite your flaws or idiosyncrasies, then isn't the lie worth looking past? There is so much more to someone than the skeletons in their closet. Please love the part of someone that you know you have love for... despite the masks that are coming off.

Transparency in someone has more to do with what you see in them than how they appear. When you read a book, you don't do it by the cover, you do it by digging into the plot. And when you have a book that you don't want to put down, you won't put it down. I hope you won't put this book down, there is such a good ending coming up. I do believe in happily ever afters. Despite the ups and downs that everyone goes through along the way. There is a forever out there. And the masks being revealed are not a way of hiding from you, but a way of giving you the good with the bad. Can you look past the limits you have to keep reading the story? It is a good story. There are parts that are sad, and hurtful, but there are so many happy moments. There are so many heart warming moments, and exciting spontaneous moments. There are so many good plot lines in this book. And there are so many chapters left to write together. Write the rest together. Don't put the book on a shelf to get dusty. Let the masks come off, their masks and yours.

I remember watching a television show. There was a blind girl who fell in love with someone, who saw her blindness as a disability at first, and didn't know if he could look past that blindness, until he finally realized the blindness didn't show who the girl was really. But when he finally fell in love with her, she found out that he was a white man. And being black, she rejected the idea of looking at the racial differences and stopped seeing the man. How utterly disturbing that people can let go of a mask and let go of all the good behind the person when the mask is taken off.