I mean as in Spy x Family. Everyone has a secret they hide from everyone else, even their closest people.
Do you think real life is like that?
What’ll really blow you’re mind is when you realize we aren’t even honest with ourselves either.
Your mask you show to others is no more fake than the mask you show to yourself.
Masking is how I get through the Christmas season as it’s a time of year I really struggle mentally.
That said, I think their use of it is more tied to the Japanese concept of “your three faces”. One you show the world, one you show your closest friends and one you only show yourself.
https://www.pranshuwrites.com/2025/01/The-Three-Faces-Japanese-Psychology.html?m=1
Very interesting read on tatemae and honne, thanks for the link. Always love it when I discover that some culture has a word for a familiar concept/thing
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How could pleasing older women ever bring dishonor‽
Mohammed himself did as much with Khadija!
Be the change the world needs by replacing oil with pleasure as Saudi Arabia’s strongest export!
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It’s certainly better than the reverse.
You getting married or just fornicating?
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Well, at least you know this can’t last forever. 🤷😅
As someone with ADHD, absolutely. I’ve heard that many people with nerodivergent brains use this coping skill.
I’m wondering to what extent some self diagnosed neurodivergent people experience normal, but generally unacknowledged mental experiences and think they must be weird, otherwise it would be talked about more.
As others point out in the thread, this is generally written up as a universal experience of people.
Haven’t watched but going by your description alone : absolutely and I think it’s necessary.
Your closest person could be ok with most topics except for a few that maybe you talk to a therapist about as this person would incredibly sensitive with said topics to the point they’d have a meltdown or have very limited experience and start giving terrible and/or biased advice on. And maybe you care about all the other aspects about this person enough that you just save it for the therapist. EG: family trauma, mental illness, etc. and the therapist relationship, while different and not as deep, it can functionally overlap these missing parts and give you what you need to share it.
Or maybe that person does understand but can’t find the right language and say it in the way you need or want to hear it. Or you could have issues trying to share your perspective. Again: what a trained therapist can help you with.
And that is fair. I think we need to understand and respect the limitations of the people we love and respect our own boundaries about such topics. There’s only so far you can stretch a person or the relationship with them. It’s healthy to recognize this.
It’s also important to realize that no one other person on earth is going to be your entire witness of your life. Especially when they are already witnessing their own life. Equally: You are your full witness. This is your journey. You’re just sharing part of your ride with other people.
I think everyone has about 3 “versions” of themselves.
One version for work. One for family. One for friends and partners.
The work version is the least honest because so much is unacceptable to say at work and people self-censor a lot. Say the wrong things and you will get meetings, write ups and maybe fired. Everybody gives their boss to much information at least one time and learns why you don’t do that.
The friends and partners version is normally the most honest version and can be completely genuine for some. Good friends can be trusted to keep secrets and don’t judge.
Family is normally in the middle but this depends. If the family was incredibly old fashioned, conservative or religious then maybe a person would need to self-censor even more than they do at work?
No. I think people are extremely diverse in how they experience and engage with their individual subjectivity. I think a lot of people are like that at least some of the time, but it’s more complicated and probably a nonconscious behavior for most people when they are doing it. Describing it as a “mask” I think is potentially misleading because I don’t think that’s necessarily how people experience this phenomena subjectively.
Persona (psychology) - Wikipedia https://share.google/aeMgXcVW6RqPHrwg7
As for everyone keeping a secret from everyone? Maybe. You don’t have to share everything with everyone, it’s ok to keep stuff to yourself if you want to. Most secrets are probably pretty banal though.
Yes.
Love, -A formerly closeted queer person.
Yes. We all have an avatar
For the sake of the survey, I know I do.
Some social scientists say there’s yet another self even beyond these masks: your true self. They say you can never really know your true self.
The Johari window describes the 4 “views” of who we are. Oftentimes, the masks we choose to display do not come across to others how we’d expect.
Real life is indeed like that yes
Internal Family Systems teaches that we have multiple internal personas that have different roles in protecting the true self at the center. It has been useful for self discovery, though I don’t know if I believe it’s completely correct
I did learn that I have multiple sets of behaviors that l adopt based on need. It’s like code switching, except it changes everything - speech cadence, word choice, body language, thought patterns, you name it. It’s not multiple personalities or anything, just changing relative proportions of various traits for a given situation, like job switching in an RPG. It was initially really jarring for my partner. They are one of the few people I’m genuinely myself around, but if I’m in a very stressful situation or interacting with co-workers about work, they see me acting very differently. It’s disconcerting but it makes me more flexible in social situations.
Edit: I also recently learned I’m what is known amongst the commoners as “autistic as fuck”, so that may be a factor. Still learning!
Like most things, I believe it’s on a spectrum, with some people being very much who they seem, and some people being completely disingenuous. We all do things that we know others would frown upon (to one degree or another), so it’s always tempting to hide those things, sometimes to the extent that we hide the whole part of ourselves that would do then.
