Donning Masks to be loved

My partner, Wonono, and I watched “Murder in the First” last night with Kevin Bacon, , which upset me as much as “Cuckoo’s Nest” did years ago.  In  each the person is brutalized for not conforming, or for just being themselves, or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In my early years I was brought up in a liberal household, my mom glued to the TV watching the Army/McCarthy hearings, and was encouraged to speak my mind.  My teachers grew to hate me, and punished me over and over in an effort to silence me.  Other parents were threatened by what was happening to me, so they urged their children to no longer be friends with me. My life became one of isolation.  I was very lonely.  When I awakened this morning, I felt quite frightened, and being me, started to think about why, connecting the dots as best I could.  Watching Kevin Bacon being tortured for years on end brought up my old childhood terror, that I would say or do the wrong thing and end up all alone.  The image of friends who have disappeared surfaced, and then I wondered if I should be more careful about what I say, or reveal, with my partner, because he might go away too.  When he woke up we started to talk about it.  He calls it switching masks, needing to reveal only this part of himself with one person, that part with another, and so on.  Because he is non-white, he learned to switch masks at a very young age.  There are very few people he can be himself with, and accepts that as part of his life.  I strive to be real all the time, which, I suppose, is tiresome for some people who know me.  He thinks my probing  is frightening and threatening to many people, who just want to glide past the unpleasant aspects of their lives, to get away from them. Hearing about mine brings up theirs, so they move away  I always want to understand those aspect of my life, and my part in them, so that I don’t hide, so that I become, in the end, the full person I am, not just one part of me or another on any given day.  I hate that I can become as frightened as I felt this morning, and that I actually considered hiding from this man I live with and love, and wondered who else I had to change for, so that they, too would not disappear. Because I’m no longer a child, this upset and fear didn’t take hold.  He and I talked, I cried, and here I am at my computer.  But I still feel an unease, almost as if my childhood fear is a disease I carry inside me that can be triggered at any time.  I suppose I should be grateful that I have tools to cope now that I didn’t have earlier in my life.  I told him what was happening for me instead of shutting down, and the terror in the pit of my stomach went away. But I also wish that fear would finally be buried, once and for all and never surface again.