being true to the real me

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements, and lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemable. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
C.S. Lewis – The Four Loves / Chapter 6

There it is. One of the most influential writers and champions of truth claims it from the rooftops – to love is to be real! At this time in culture, the cry for authenticity is the banner of a whole mass of people. Things are not as they seem because everyone is pretending to be someone that they are not. The have become these personas because everyone else is wearing a mask. Wearing the mask helps us as a people to avoid the risk of being mocked, ridiculed, or jabbed for being the ugly duckling. The longer we put on the masks the further we push down the real us. Our identity is buried so deep, we have no idea who we really are. The scary thing is that the personas work so well in the façade of this charade of life, that we don’t even consider looking beneath the mask. The mask has become our view of ourselves. We have accepted our own deception as the truth.