it's called roles. we play the sibling role, parent role, friend and SO role, our job role. there is no true self, just adjusting to meet the role's needs.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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I've always thought of it like a d20. For every role we occupy, we show a different facet on top. Some facets remain visible despite not being the "dominant" one, but others are hidden on the other side.
No single face is our "true self" but they are all a part of who we are.
Or persona per the psychologist Karl Jung IIRC.
So definitely a thing for basically everyone.
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
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.
That is not universal, some of us have actually thought about things for a long time and are honest with ourselves.
I try to be honest with myself about everything, but I'm also honest with myself that sometimes I subconsciously avoid thinking about things consciously anyway
Wrong person sorry
Acknowledging that sometimes you avoid thinking about certain things is part of being honest with yourself, even when it is subconcious. Being aware of who you are doesn't automatically change anything.
I find being honest with myself to be easy anymore. It's not something I've always been good at but I've worked on it. Understanding myself is still hard at times. If I'm feeling a certain way about something, sometimes I have to pause for a while to think about why.
Example: the wife and I have an argument about something (which is rare) and I take offense to something she said. She never says anything with the intent of offending me. I know this even though I'm feeling angry. Instead of just reacting in anger, I like to put a pause on the discussion, be alone for a while, and think about why I was offended.
The reasons vary but I pretty much always figure it out, after which I'm ready to resume the discussion with, it nothing else, a little more clarity.
My friend I’ve thought about who I am for 20 years. You are not honest with yourself if you believe you are honest with yourself.
People meditated on mountains for decades to be honest with themself. You didn’t accomplish that on Tuesday. Neither have I.
We get closer but to truly reach that point… we probably zero-sum and cease to be.
We learn to lie before we learn to speak. It’s part of all of us. You can’t escape it unfortunately. It is the default setup.
You are not honest with yourself if you believe you are honest with yourself.
That is a load of self defeating bullshit.
It is often difficult, but not impossible, to be honest with ourselves. Hell, there might even be things we didn't consider because they slipped our minds, like whether we acted in a selfish way or not when we were 10 years old, but that doesn't mean we are not being honest with ourselves. Being honest means that when we do think about something specific, we can consider our thoughts and actions and not hardwave them away without thought. It also acknowledges that things are often complicated and how we see things and how others perceive us doesn't align.
But being honest doesn't mean perfectly perceiving everything, it means actually thinking things through and not letting our pride or other hang ups get in the way of introspection.
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How does the mountain help one be honest with themselves?
If I could answer that I’d write a book. I’d make million dollars and never count it lol.
My point is simple tho, it’s not just as simple as “oh I don’t do that anymore. I never lie to myself”
Dude tell me everything?! Where’s your book? Do you have a commune I could attend?
This is profound information the world itself has been searching for and you have it? Tell me, please?
God I wish I had a very strained pun to reply with.
To summit all up, you get a peak at your inner... self?
We can workshop it, there might be something there.
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My Saudi parents back home think I’m a good Muslim young man. Meanwhile, I’m in Europe having adventures with women old enough to be my mom, among other things; so I’d rather not dishonor the family just yet.
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!
Purity culture combined with fertility expectations frames older women as low value, damaged or “used goods.” For example, my parents believe the ideal age gap is five years, with the man being older, and that couples should marry in their twenties.
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You getting married or just fornicating?
Just fornicating. I’m young, I want variety, and I’m enjoying myself.
Well, at least you know this can't last forever. 🤷😅
I think I'd go further and say that there isn't really any such thing as a person's "true self." People present different aspects of themselves in different circumstances. It's like asking which orientation you should hold an object against a light to see the "true shape" of its shadow.
I believe thats whats called in Buddhism as having No Self. You are who you are at that moment.
Could be, I'm not deeply familiar with Buddhism. There's still a core "something" in there that's casting the shadow, but it's not something that can be interacted with directly so I don't know if it would fit the normal definition of a "self". You can only directly interact with the shadows it casts and those shadows are situation-dependent. It doesn't think or act in isolation.
I suppose one could just pick some specific set of circumstances and call the self that emerges under those conditions the "true self." For example you could call the version of you that emerges when you're lying in bed alone at night thinking about the dumb stuff you did during the day your "true self." But that's a bit arbitrary.
I wouldn't call it a "mask", because it implies deception. Depending on who you are around, you show (and hide) different treats of your personality: In an employment setting you do not act the same way you would act when you hang with your boys (or girls, respectively) - you show different aspects of your personality while you are with your significant other, rather than with your parents. Also, your online behavior would be different from your offline behavior when navigating public situations.
Different people around you and/or different social settings make you filter things regarding your personal beliefs and/or personal traits.
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.
The person you don't show others is no more your "true self" than the one you do. It's still you, existing in that moment, responding to your environment, whether it's your deepest emotions or your best mask.
Politicians do this all of the time. Say and do one thing as theater to the public, turn around and do and say different things out of the public eye we later find out about.
I do this fairly often too. Where I work, nobody doesn't need to know of shit about my personal life, it is none of their business. There's nobody I like enough there that warrants me gushing about myself. I have about maybe five key friends who all know in depth of me, but how I tell things slightly differs from another but they're generally getting the same stories and experiences I talk about.
As someone with ADHD, absolutely. I've heard that many people with nerodivergent brains use this coping skill.
Everyone has 3 personalities.
The person they are around strangers.
The person they are with friends and family.
The person they are when completely alone.
I have a collection of masks. I assume others are like that too.
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?
They covered this when I took Sociology 101 about 40 years ago.
Huh. Did not expect a SPYxFAMILY reference here! わくわく!
Linkin Park said it 25 years ago, "everyone has a face that they hold inside," I think that was in Papercut, the opening track to their debut album, Hybrid Theory. Good song about that.
I don't really believe everyone has a true self they hide. I do believe we don't share certain things with certain people, sometimes for good reason.
What I do believe is that we are a different person to every person who knows us. That is to say, if your parents are still together, you have these two people who have known you since you were an infant, but they have different views of you. Or if you have a decent sized friend group, each of these friends sees you slightly differently. I think this is more useful to us. Knowing who we are to each person we meet; rather than focusing on the persona we share with others, understanding how another sees us and acting accordingly can be used to great influence and effect. Find the people who underestimate you and show them what you can do. Find the people who don't like you and show them kindness. Things like that.
People have different facets. The way I interact with my partner for ten years is different to my close friends I've had for 20, different to my co-workers, different to my family. But my family and friends and co-workers see how I act with my partner.
I mimic people to some extent treating them similarly how they treat me. There are limits though, I'm bounded on that scale by my personal values which mature as I do. So I'm still never going to act outside the bounds of my morality and values, but I'll still treat my partner with unconditional love, and my friends with the best times and silly jokes.
These I don't consider masks, but not everyone sees me the same. They're just facets.
Yes. There are many different traits that I would all call a part of me but how much I act out on them is different between different people.
In some groups there are topics that define me for the other members, while in other groups the members don't know I even care for this topic
I overact some traits but what topic I overact os different in each group
Yes.
Love, -A formerly closeted queer person.
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.
No. We change how we present but that doesn't make those presentations "false" or what we don't share more "true".
For the sake of the survey, I know I do.
Yes. We all have an avatar
You would love Erving Goffman
Real life is indeed like that yes
I do have filters on what I say in different contexts, but do not consider it a mask as I will always say the same things outside of the filtered contexts. So while I don't bring up a lot of things at work, it is simply because it isn't relevant to work and isn't something I want to talk about at work. There isn't a presentation of something else.
Like I don't bring up hobbies for the same reason I don't bring up my sex life, it just isn't relevant. I don't consider anything like that to be a mask.
The closest would be that I phrase things at work in a more positive and less critical manner, but it is pretty subtle and if that is considered masking then the word loses a lot of meaning for people who behave completely differently from who they are due to social pressures.
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.
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!
To a certain degree, and it sounds exhausting. It also varies with culture (Brits are more masked than Polish people, for instance). Now, I have discernment so I don't always just blurt out whatever's on my mind (especially around people like my MIL and my older relatives), but I don't see it as a mask, it's more on the level of holding in some farts, lol. I haven't changed my mind about anything and if something arises that would test my values I'll still just be me and act accordingly, I'm just not mentioning what comes to my mind when I see my wife bra-less, for example.
Regardless, there's us, the perception we have of us and the perception others have of us. We should at least make sure the first two are as close as possible. Also, personally, I'm too proud not to be myself, and since I know I lead a mostly harmless and somewhat selfless life, I have no moral qualms going at it raw and maskless!
My ADHD says yes.
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