You can never be yourself

The masks fit better with each passing year.

Morning. You reach for a face in the dark like a commuter groping for a handrail and find the usual inventory: “Colleague, compliant,” “Friend, frictionless,” “Adult child, low explosive risk.” You fasten one on by habit. It smells like disinfected rubber and last week’s fear. No one comments. The office lights hum. The day begins.

Again.

Work is a theater with fluorescent lighting and emergency exits that lead back into the theater. We rehearse “alignment” until the word means anesthesia. Slack is a system for ventriloquizing dead ideas. HR prints “Bring your whole self to work” on mugs, which is funny, because the whole self violates policy. “Ownership” means you are responsible for the result and not authorized for the cause. “Transparency” means the glass is spotless while something huge dies on the other side.

Parents? They know the curated cut. They know the chair-straightening, polite-lie edition of you that keeps dinner edible. Family is the original compliance department, issuing fines in disappointment. They carry a portrait of you like a passport photo: dated, flat, but official. You maintain it because revolutions at the kitchen table have a very low survival rate. Love, in this house, is a series of redactions. They can never know you.

Friend groups are safer but not safe. In one, you’re the comic relief; in another, the confidant; elsewhere, the designated lifeguard for other people’s catastrophes. The one time you speak in your own voice, the air goes metallic. Everyone stares like the furniture just addressed the room. The laughter returns. A role reasserts itself. You nod along, correctly.

Well done.

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Online is where identity goes for industrial packaging. You become export-grade. Angles tested. Blur removed. You are optimized for shareability, then the shares optimize you right back. Some call this “authenticity.” It is—if authenticity means a product you assemble out of yourself and ship on schedule. Please keep your hands inside the identity at all times.

“Hell is other people,” wrote Sartre; not because they are demons, but because other people are mirrors bolted to the wall. You may dislike how you look; the mirror doesn’t care. Camus said, “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” The world is silent; the crowd fills the silence with instructions; you perform the instructions until you can’t hear your own interior weather. Little wonder your skull clicks like a bad light switch.

Who are you?
Is there a real you beneath all those masks?
Are you sure?

Nietzsche: “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers.” The line is less a provocation than an autopsy note. You are not a statue under disguises; you are a verb trying to pretend it’s a noun. The mask is not placed upon the face; the mask is what the face learned to be in rooms where unmasking carries a cost. Schopenhauer whispers from the oddly dark corridor: “A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” You selected the role, yes. But with a will stitched from other people’s threads.

The performance is older than your politics, older than your trauma. Mammals survived by reading each other’s faces before they read the sky. The herd smells misfit like smoke. So you tuck the flame under your tongue and learn to smile without exhaling. The mouth is a ventilation system; we use it to say “I’m fine” while carbon monoxide builds.

You will be told there is a buried core—some unmarketed, unmonetized, unsupervised You—waiting like a seed in winter. Maybe. But how would you verify it? With language? Wittgenstein: the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. If the words themselves are issued by the same factory that prints the roles, how do you utter a self that isn’t already branded? (Customer support has no answer. Please hold. Your call is very important to us.)

Shakespeare: all the world’s a stage. Cool. But the problem isn’t that we’re acting; it’s that the script keeps writing the actor. You deliver enough lines in the voice of “acceptable,” and the muscles of the throat forget how to shape anything else. The costume fuses. The zipper vanishes. The skin stops being negotiable.

You want a punchline? Here you go, man: the insistence on “being yourself” is the most successful marketing campaign of the last century, and there is no product in the box. Be You™—now available in five pre-approved variants. Add to cart. Add to cart again. The cart is you.

Who are you? You are what the room allowed, plus what you hid, plus what you can no longer separate. That isn’t mystical; it’s logistics. Supply chains of gazes, approvals, and quiet punishments braided into a posture. When you ask for the “real you,” you are asking for a receipt that was never printed.

Is there a real you beneath all those masks? If there is, it breathes like a small animal in a house full of hunters. It rarely leaves tracks. It knows the calendar of surveillance, the hours when the cameras blink. Sometimes it flickers—between sentences, in the half-second before you select the safe tone, in the rain-wet walk from office door to public transit—then it shuts itself off like light in a war. Not because it is fragile (it isn’t), but because it is outnumbered.

You think this is a tragedy with a twist of redemption at the end. It isn’t. This is maintenance. You will keep changing faces. Some will be assigned; some will be begged for; some will be stolen. The show will go on without an intermission and end exactly once, and there will be an exit interview you cannot attend. Your headstone will list your job title because the living need filing systems. People will say you were “yourself.” They will mean you were consistent enough to remember.

Meanwhile, the questions keep knocking like debt collectors:

Who are you, when no one is watching?
Who are you, when everyone is?
Is there a you that is neither?
If it spoke, would you recognize it?

You can never be yourself. Not because you’re weak, and not because the world is evil. It’s because “yourself” is a moving target, and you are the archer and the wind and the arrow and the person booing from the stands. You will always be unhappy, yes—but not theatrically. More like a low, professional hum. The kind buildings make. The kind you only notice when the power fails.

The lights stay on. The masks fit better every year. The audience applauds on cue. Somewhere behind the stage a small animal blinks, uncatalogued, immaculate, unmarketed. It does not answer to your name.

Antonio Melonio

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