Every day, you wake up in a cold, damp room, more like a cave than a home. There, despair and loneliness overwhelm you. The darkness barely lets you see the reality of your bedroom, but you can see just enough to know you weren’t born for this. You can’t sleep through the night because you feel cold—cold with remorse and restlessness, cold with fear of rejection, cold of loneliness. Cold of death.
It seems that each morning is just another step, one step closer to the eternal end, to the curtain falling, and that terrifies you. You’re scared because you don’t know what’s behind that curtain, because there, wherever that may be, you’ll face something you can’t control. Every day you wake up to nothing—absolute zero. You have nothing, you belong to nothing and no one. You are naked, vulnerable, fragile, wounded, alone, and dead.
That’s when you leave your cave, your home. It’s crucial that before anyone sees you, you pick up the mask from wherever you dropped it yesterday. Sometimes it’s hard. If you got too drunk, you don’t remember where you threw it, so you have to search for it. You put it on. It’s a mask of sufficiency, of normality, one that has the teeth well-cleaned. It’s the mask of someone who isn’t afraid, who doesn’t ask himself uncomfortable questions. You look at yourself in the mirror, comb your hair, put on a freshly pressed suit—can’t have anyone notice where you live or who you really are. Next to the entrance of your dreadful dwelling, you left a bundle with some things you’ll need out there, in the charade they call reality. In this bundle, you find useful items like the money you worked so hard to earn, money for which they’ve stolen a part of your life. But with it, you can have something as important as friends, as acceptability, as toothpaste or hair gel. You might even, one day, buy some paint to cover the cracks starting to form in your mask.
Out there, everyone is happy, everyone lives lives worth living; so, you too must show that you have it all, that you are worth it, that your life is even more worth living than everyone else’s. After all, that’s what the charade they call reality is about—appearing, pretending, shouting that you matter, that you exist. Beyond that, it’s all about survival.
Thus, you throw yourself into conquering the “real” world, and you keep selling your time and soul to the highest bidder. You need more money in your bundle, a prettier mask, a better car, you need to feel good looking at your life, and you don’t mind prostituting yourself to get it. Your destiny doesn’t matter, your health or purity don’t matter. Your future doesn’t matter. Now you need to win, you need to be, you need to matter, you need to have. And that’s what you do. You get what you want, you climb ranks, you gain friends, you step on anyone to keep climbing, to have more, to achieve more, to be worth more. You resort to whatever it takes to get there. Alcohol, sex, drugs, lies, looking down on others—all filtered through the eye holes in your mask—are tools in your hand to get it. You’re the king of the world, you have what you want, no one can tell you what you’re doing right or wrong, you’ve won. You don’t owe anything to anyone, you climbed all by yourself, you reached your peak, no one supervises you, no one orders you. You’re free.
And so, you reach the end of your day of gains, of freedom, of appearances, of lies, of masks. You return to your home—if you can even call that cold, damp cave a home. Before entering, you have to leave the bundle you worked so hard for on the ground, hoping it’ll still be there tomorrow, just as you left it. You enter, trying to keep upright after drinking more than you should. At the cave’s entrance, a tear already escapes as you raise your hands to your face to grab the mask. You tear it off in one swift motion, and the sufficiency and superiority turn into pain and bitterness, loneliness and resentment. You remove the suit that deceived everyone else, and you realize that no matter how much you try, it doesn’t deceive you. You discover that the nakedness of your soul cannot be covered by any suit, that your world of gains, health, and pride is a lie, that the truth of your life is your cave, your loneliness, your feelings of bitterness, that the truth is the cold, the darkness, the loneliness, the dampness. That it is worthless to gain the whole world if, at the end of the day, you lose everything. That it is worthless to gain the whole world if, at the end of your life, you lose it all.
You curl up in a corner and try to sleep, one more day. You know that the next day will bring more of this lie you live in, the one everyone lives in. Could it be that what they call life is really just this lie?
One day, you’ll have to face the final curtain, you’ll have to confront eternity. The path of lies, gains, and returns to darkness will end sooner or later. And then, there will be no mask that can cover the truth.
“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26, NASB)
Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.” (John 6:68, NASB)
