Masks

Good evening ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to our masquerade! "What masquerade?," you ask yourself. This is a Toastmasters meeting and not a masquerade where we wear masks. But I tell you, we all wear masks everyday of our lives. We hide our real selves behind the masks we create. Sometimes we get so used to these masks we wear that we forget our real selves, what our real feelings are.
Psychologists have a way of describing how people create this mask we wear. They call them defense mechanisms. Simply described, a defense mechanism is an unconscious denial, distortion or falsification of reality in order to protect the ego from excessive anxiety. Simply put, we all have our way of coping with reality in order to make it less stressful for us. Looking at it this way, our masks serve a purpose, it protects us from having bad feelings. However, there are certain ways of how such defense mechanisms can alienate us from the people we love. For instance, when a certain experience is ...