Take off your mask, I beg of you.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky (from The Brothers Karamazov)

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

A fulfilling cycle aimed at dispelling negativity in one’s life. I draw a lot of inspiration from Taoism and Buddhism in my everyday life to achieve a state of perpetual contentment.

Want nothing, need nothing – this is the way to achieve an enlightened state.

I am the type of person who has attempted all sorts of masquerades and intellectual focus in order to treat my ailment…

What is my ailment? In short, the inescapable horror of my inner mind’s eye, pushed forward by a lifetime of being in the front row for humanity’s displays of the 7 Deadly Sins.

Don’t get me wrong here, I am not religious by any means – in fact, I identify my beliefs as foremostly a non-organisational higher-being respector, with a ‘What would Jesus do?’ mindset.

But I do believe in the concept of sin.

When I say ‘sin’, I do not mean the typical drone of archaic scripture, speaking about Human Nature as something in itself as sinful (sex, drugs, love, vanity). We are beings of expression, communication, and experimentation. We crave to simply be.

However, I argue that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to be. And, I don’t mean through any higher-power deeming rituals, or acts of servitude to appease. I am talking about a chronic, inexplicable grasp of what is ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’. Even modern-day religions struggle to explain the difference…

Simply doing a positive action to receive your ‘due’ holy rewards receives no marks in my mind.

I am wholly appalled by the charity work of those who place themselves in a position of ‘holier than thou’, in attempts to exonerate their other hypocritical actions, usually relying on archaic holy scripture to validate their prejudice. I only speak from experience, not worshippers as a whole, and do not invalidate the good work these sinners do – they are helping people, at the end of the day.

But I am a believer that intentions matter. Your mens rea will always incriminate you – and lucky for me, I am an excellent judge of character. But this is an evil trade of skills – to understand the mindset, you must first become it.

I have been a sinner.

I have concealed who I am, my intentions, my reasons – a fear that no one would understand, or worse … they would.

I feared being perceived.

I constantly wore a mask.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

Now we have the rightous speal out of the way, we may turn to the crux of this article.

We are all liars, every single one of us. Of course, that’s society’s fault, partly.

We are society. We enforce invisible rules, complex and unforgiving for mistakes made.

Rampant insecuties flows through our veins, sickly-green with envy blood cells, circling through our bodies. They will exist within us forever, unless we dispel the rot.

We are constantly wearing a mask to cover our authentic selves, always deemed as something ‘other’. We have slowly all become carbon copies of what we deem to be worthy of… ‘want’. Do you see where I’m going with this, now?

So the question is…

Who do you pretend to be?

And are you okay with that?