What is showing your true face?
Come out from behind the mask…
~
We all know that social media can be deceptive.
To our credit, we are becoming wiser to the fact that what we see posted on our friends’ Instagram and Facebook pages might not be an accurate representation of how glorious their lives are.
I, for one, have just returned from a 2 week holiday to the Philippines with my boyfriend and the trip was an Instagrammer’s dream. My social media audience let me know just how perfect the trip looked.
To be honest — it was pretty perfect…
BUT… behind the social media front… there was a particular moment which didn’t feel so pretty at the time.
On the flight home, I watched a movie called “Wonder”.
The story centres around a 10 year old boy who was born with a rare medical facial deformity and we follow his journey as he moves from home schooling into the big bad world of middle school.
I pressed pause about half an hour into the film during a scene in which Julia Roberts’ character, Isabel, is trying to comfort her son, Auggie, who is being bullied at school because of his looks.
He cries, “why do I have to be so ugly?”
“We all have marks on our face,” she tells her son, pointing to her wrinkles. Then, she points to her heart and says:
“This is the map that shows us where we are going,” before pointing back to her face, “and this is the map that shows us where we’ve been.”
I needed a moment to reflect.
What does it really mean to move past how things appear on the surface and accept, nay love, the person underneath?
People without physical deformities have a different kind of challenge. Sometimes we use the shiny external veneer to mask the imperfections that hide beneath. So if the cover seems intact, how do we learn to love any ugliness that might be on the inside?
It was on the second day of my vacation that I was forced to confront this question.
We were staying on a remote and untouched island.
Our accommodation; a wooden hut on stilts hovering over a white sand beach with crystal clear water as far as the eye can see.
In other words, paradise.
But it’s not the kind of place you want to be when there are seemingly gale force winds and absolutely no protection.
With the wind rattling our bones, my boyfriend and I did our best to swallow the frustration, but the smiles and positivity were strained, with the forecast telling us this weather was here to stay for the duration of our trip (lesson number 1 — do not trust meteorologists).
For breakfast, we sat at a table next to the “window”… as in… towards the edges of the big wooden hut serving as the dining area.
One minute I was putting my fork into a piece of mango… the next I felt an enormous crack to the back of my head.
The heavy wooden beam which suspended the blinds protecting us from the wind had been blown off its hinge and smacked me on the skull.
Now, I tend to be accident prone — and I’m a pretty tough cookie… but this one took me down.
As my head went into my hands on the table… one over my eyes, one over the big knock which was quickly growing into a significant lump on my head… I felt the tears swell.
Ordinarily I’d just swallow the pain, sit up and smile to diffuse the situation and let the island cohort (which was quickly gathering around me) move on from the scene.
But I just couldn’t lift my head up.
Not only from the pain… but from the surge of emotion that was rising inside of me.
While the concerned staff tried to communicate with me via my boyfriend, I just zoned out as he managed to dispel the crowd.
I could feel that I needed to be on my own … I needed to compose myself.
Eventually I excused myself from the table and walked back to our private digs.
The moment I walked through the doors, in Oscar award winning style, I flung myself face down onto the bed and let it pour out.
And then it began…
A panic attack.
I hadn’t had one of these in a very long time, but recognised it instantly.
The shortness of breath — the dizziness — the lack of control or choice as to whether this is how you want to respond to the scenario.
Strangely, the image of my Dad’s face kept flashing into my mind.
Just as I was getting into the throes of it, I felt my boyfriend sit down next to me, on the bed.
“Baby — talk to me.”
I could tell he was baffled.
I’d been hit on the head with a pole — so I got a fright. But, why was I being (as it would appear to him) so ‘dramatic’?
All I wanted in that moment was for him to go away… to let me unravel in private…
For him not to see me in such a state.
For him not to see my ugliness.
But he wasn’t moving — and eventually … I found myself softening and holding onto his hand — allowing the emotions to work their way through my body…
And there it was again.
My Dad’s face.
It was here I was able to recognise what this was all about;
I had literally been hit on the head with the fact that life can change in an instant.
And I was angry.
Let me take you back.
I was not yet 10 years old when, in the blink of an eye, my world as I had known it turned upside down.
My parents were hosting a surprise birthday party for my Mum’s sister at our house.
The celebration had barely begun when there was a flurry of nervous activity.
The scene of that night is burned into my mind; watching several men carrying my Dad down the stairs… his face pale and his eyes vacant.
Years later, my mum told me that as he was laid down onto the back seat of my uncle’s car, bound for the hospital, I tapped on the window and said “I love you, Dad”.
That was it.
He never came home.
It was in an instant that our lives changed.
He spent the next 13 years as a severely brain damaged quadriplegic (as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage) — living in a nursing home, until his end.
So here I was, more than two decades since that event — and the symbolism of the moment was visceral.
After a quick smack on the head, I was now purging those same feelings of that scared little girl; the one who had learned so abruptly about the fragility of life, how quickly things can change and how little control we have.
This is what was behind the panic.
But let’s not forget my witness; my boyfriend of only a few months.
I was surprised to hear him say that he knows very little about that side of my life; that I rarely talk about it. I suppose that when it’s so much a part of you, you assume the people you love, already know.
Once it was all over, I found myself asking him, “please don’t tell anyone about this”…
His face twisted with confusion at the request.
“Why on earth would I do that?” he asked.
But there was my moment of recognition: I was trying to hide something from the world.
I wanted to hide the part of me that I had always considered to be ugly.
I have known for some years now why I feel a sense of shame around an emotional collapse — and of course it goes back to childhood.
The mind of an adult is a curious thing. We often walk around, living our adult lives, but guided by a bunch of beliefs that are based on conclusions we drew as kids — conclusions that as we grow older and wiser, we fail to update.
When my Dad got sick, I had decided that as the eldest child, I needed to step into the role of the second parent; and not just any parent, it was now required of me to be the Dad.
To a 10 year old that makes complete sense.
And OBVIOUSLY I had a wealth of knowledge to draw upon: Dads are tough, Dads don’t fall down in a heap and Dads certainly don’t cry. That’s just basic fact.
So, I put my grown-ups helmet on and pushed down any emotion I had pertaining to my family’s loss.
Of course, that didn’t last long.
At 15 years old, I was diagnosed with clinical depression. I’m lucky enough to say, that is now long behind me.
But in the years after the mental illness lifted, I worked through a lot of guilt around the additional burden I had placed on my family while I was sick.
I’d berate myself — “Why had I been so weak as to fall apart?” “Why had my mother been able to hold it together — my younger siblings too?”
I was ashamed — and I was still carrying that shame with me underneath this tough adult exterior — despite the intellectual understanding that mental illness is not a choice or reflection of one’s character.
The hangover from that shame meant that even now, every time I cry (which is often), I can see that 10 year old girl inside of me rolling her eyes in disappointment.
Cue transition point…
Here I was, post panic attack — puffy eyed and with that stuttered breath kids get after a temper tantrum — and the man standing opposite me, was still holding my hand.
~
10 year old Auggie emerges victorious in the film.
He learns to love himself and serves as an inspiration to the children around him who learn to look beyond the ‘ugly’ exterior and see the beautiful boy inside.
If Auggie can do it, well, so can I.
It’s ok to be imperfect. It’s ok to be bruised. It’s ok to be vulnerable and scared.
We can embrace our deformities… because they simply show the map of where we’ve been… and it’s in our hearts… that we’ll find the map for where we’re going.
Meantime in the Philippines, the bad weather did clear the very next day.
The pictures barely do justice for the beauty of that archipelago.
But don’t be fooled… because life is not a series of perfectly constructed images.
The real beauty is in the moments that can’t be photographed.
