David McElroy

Whatever perceived consensus might have once existed in this country about the sort of place “we” wanted it to be is now gone.

There was a broad mythical narrative that a large majority basically bought into — and most of those people were white. Because black and brown people didn’t have political power and were vastly underrepresented in media, the perception existed that the mainstream white culture was “the American culture.”

This broad white culture was seen by most as what the country “ought to be.”

Although there was vigorous competition within that white culture for power and control, the cultural consensus was fairly well accepted. Other groups were considered tiny players in the political and social sense.

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You are deceiving the world around you. And I am, too.

We mostly do it by what we don’t show to other people. We deceive by the things we hide. It’s not a conscious decision. We learned in our formative years what people didn’t like about us. We learned the parts of us that would cause us trouble when others saw them.

And so we learned to hide who we are.

We built masks for ourselves. We learned what would make people approve of us — and we wore those masks with pride. We craved approval. We craved love. We didn’t understand what we were doing, but we learned that acting in certain ways got us more of what we needed.

We learned to think of those artificial behaviors as our personalities. We learned to believe that these masks we showed the world were who we really are. But we were fooling ourselves.

Personality is a mask. That’s not who you are. Your personality is the defense you learned to use — to hide the real you from the world. And most of us hid so well that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.

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