The Boy behind the Mask

For 37 years, and 9 months the face, no, the boy, I saw reflected in the mirror was a mask. It projected strength, power, know how, bravado, cowardice in all forms, and hypocrisy.It hid my fears, my inequities, my flawed understandings, my emotional handicaps. It allowed me to keep people at a distance, to fend off those who got to close to understanding what or rather who was behind the mask. It allowed me a sense of control over the misbegotten creature I truly had become. It enabled me to destroy the only woman who truly loved me any time she slipped under the mask and glimpsed the boy underneath.

God was not fooled! He hammered at me and the mask through my wife, my friend and pastor, and finally thrue the eyes and words of my sweet, blue eyed awestruck daughter. Finally I accepted the fact that the mask may not be what I thought it might be. I found that it was a curse that set me apart and stunted me; a thing that had overtaken me and was such a part of me that only through the ministrations of trained medical staff who were ordained by God to save wretches like myself did the mask fall away. Death holds me no longer! I am alive but oh the pain!

I am a boy becoming the man God designed me to be at a price paid in tears and blood, in the most intimate of pain- true understanding. Understanding of what I destroyed, the pain I caused, the fear and terror I delivered,the vows brocken, the words uttered, the promises destroyed, the years wasted, the tears shed.

I am on a journey that most do not understand and few will dare follow, a journey to becoming The Man in the Mirror!