Thursday, July 15, 2010

a little beauty treatment


"God has given you one face and you make yourself another."
William Shakespeare

"We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others 
that in the end we become disguised to ourselves."
Fancois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

This photo has sat in my file for sometime and every time I come across it I chuckle a little at the memory of the moment: here girls, we're having a spa/beauty party, put this mask on and it will make you feel fresh and sparkly and beautiful! Doesn't it feel good?!

They did not like it. (Especially Bean.) They complained. They wanted their faces back.
How could this mud mask make us more beautiful?

What honesty from spirits that have yet to see their "flaws" with such magnified perception that they seek to cover it all up with avocado mud, wait for it to dry and crack so they can rinse it off and be more beautiful than they already are.

Basically they cried: What's the point? We're already beautiful!

While I chuckle at their very honest observation I have thought a lot lately about my own life, and through watching others, that most of our dysfunctions (the unhealthy parts of us) come from the masks we wear. You know? The faces we "put on" for public viewing are merely a disguise, a mask, to cover up the private one that only we secretly carry. In other words, there is the public face we project, and the private one, and often the two do. not. match.

The result is a tricky game of smoke and mirrors that we set up to convince others that what we project is the real thing, when in fact it is a scam.

Sometimes we are good at that smoke and mirrors game.
We convince some people because the scam is ever so subtle.

Other times the people around us are not fooled. (Like as in, The Wizard of Oz.)
And we become the fool.

We "become so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others that in the end we become
disguised to ourselves." We fool ourselves. 
 
Where ever you are on the spectrum, make no mistake, it is all smoke and mirrors. The problem lies in the truth that all of us, in small or large ways, at points in our life, are unaware that we are compensating for something...something we believe to be missing, or a part of our inner self that we think we need to protect. And so we project a public face to fool others, and ourselves. The remedy? To  figure out what those things are and get to the work of addressing them. Or else grow into an older, miserable version of our self that is seriously warped in its self perception, and self projection.
I guess as I grow older, and hopefully wiser, I want to be a woman that carries one face.

I want to cry, like my Bean: what's the point, I'm already beautiful!

Make sense? 





4 comments:

eveapple said...

makes perfect sense!

stacey said...

Love this. Makes wonderful sense.

Anonymous said...

your photography is so whimsical. it makes me smile.

penandview said...

thank you Sam...your comment made me smile. :)