Halloween masks all year round

I happened across something today that jarred me.

I am a person who feels compelled to be someone else, for fear of the consequences, real or imagined, of being himself. Or this describes the person I have been, to a degree.

This is excerpted from a nearly year-old story on one of my favorite web sites.

Michael Barrish was writing this in response to a) a highly affecting, very intimate essay on addiction that Mark Pilgrim wrote, and b) several messages exchanged by Mark and himself that day.

So I read the piece on addiction, and as I wrote to both Michael and Mark today, the drone of the workplace around me reduced itself to a dull hum -- so intensely did the honesty of the essay affect me.

And what I keep coming back to is what Michael wrote above. Because I could write the exact same thing.

I am like a person who rides in someone else's wake, much too concerned with affecting someone else's ride to allow myself to spin free and create my own wake. I am courteous (except when I'm on the phone, in which case if you make me angry or offend me -- no, wait, actually, I'd probably just hang up, because being known as the person who hangs up on someone is preferable to being known as the person who yelled at someone who was just doing their job, and ruined that person's day) and polite, even when I would not be, I suspect, if I were to allow myself to just be myself. But then again, I also sometimes believe that people who intentionally upset things or people or plans in the name of just being themselves are worse off than people who are wearing Halloween masks all year round.

The question that begs an answer is one that worries me: for how long can a person be a utilityman (that is, a person who shifts who he or she is in order to be most comfortable to the person he or she happens to be around) before a person becomes aware that just being himself (or herself) is impossible, because they have not been themselves in so long that they have forgotten how?

Also addiction scares me, and compulsiveness to the point of obsession. There are things that need controlling that I am too polite to myself to even acknowledge the need for control of.

I have been a lot of different mes for a lot of different people. I'd like to resolve this, to carefully tune the focus dial until the various blurry shapes of me twitch and jerk and slide into one sharp-edged, clear person.

On the other hand, this just makes me smile.