Masquerade..

Somewhere in this silence, amid the whispering that moves leaves on the forest floor, she resides. She is a woman who dwells in the expansive depths; she is the river from which literary rivulets spring in the buckets of my mind. She’s my muse, the bearer of inspiration, a powerful yet subtle spectacle that would be present regardless, and is the very reason why I write.

She is resilient, I want to say, but that would also be a lie. Resilience implies a hard won success against the odds, perhaps even a trophy earned. But she is not merely resilient, she is a refuge. She keeps emotions locked in a secure tower and hides them behind a façade of strength that she wears with breezy elan, as though she has mastered the art of repression, as though she knew exactly what to do with her storm-tossed waves. She presents a calm, silent exterior to the world, an air of unflappable sophistication. But I have seen the cracks in the walls, the moments when she peeks out from behind the parapet, when she displays an emotionality, albeit briefly.

Her opinions are hard as the walls that have grown up around her, the severity of them more certain in her mouth than in the eye, true and false as black and white. As for me, I shall not try to cross her any more than I would try to cross a badger’s sett; if she chooses, she will stay on her side of the ditch and make herself a willow herb hell of her own. This is one of the things I admire about her, the bold stance of her refusal, the treacherous ground upon which she plants her flag. But this freedom proves dangerous, too, and is more vulnerable than it looks, since in her black and whiteness she often stands alone.

But there is more to her strength than her strength: something she rarely shows; an imposter syndrome that creeps in from time to time banging at the door of the mind and heart, whispering that she does not deserve all she has or is; that some day her friends and colleagues will dissolve her false persona and find her out. This imposter syndrome is a shadow: a dark sensation linked to this being an imposter that inhibits her easy flow, interrupting some of the mind-heart’s spontaneity, and driving the useful energies into channels not of their own choosing. Under imposter-sensation’s influence, poised, graceful movement becomes a lumbering ghost-dance. She might then feel that her strength is false strength, perhaps another shadow: ‘That’s not me. It must be some other person with all that strength.’ But this shadow actually conceals the spontaneous flow, turning the river into a stream that does not run natural.

There are moments when her mask slips, when her emotions show through the holes in her armour. Her facial expressions, which even she can rarely control, occasionally betray her. A flick of an eyebrow, a creasing of the forehead, a certain look are sometimes the only time we see that things are not ok. Her eyes tell the most, and they are not always her friend. They are the mirror to her soul. We look at them and read them, and know the truth of what she is not telling anyone. In these moments, when I look upon her, I see all of her. Her soul, her mind, her feelings, and I am reminded of why she inspires.

It is not her power so much as the contradictions she contains, she who is strong and weak, certain and uncertain, open and closed. These contradictions are what keep me writing, or maybe what allow me to keep writing. From it she has given me characters who have dualities of their own, in other words, more than one side, perhaps like the rest of us. She has given me characters who are light and dark, happy and sad, strong and weak. And from these dualities I have material to write from, threads from which I weave my tales.

She is the one of the greatest gifts of my life, and the things I have learned from her continue to shape me. She has taught me that strength doesn’t always look like strength. She has taught me that vulnerability can be brave. She has taught me that the most powerful stories are those where people finally stop pretending that their lives are as they seem. She has taught me that all the best writing comes from a place of doubt: from the questions you are afraid to find the answers to. She has opened my eyes to life.

I think about her when I am writing, the way she goes about her days, the way she moves her head when she speaks, the way her eyes tell a story before her mouth does, my muse I go there every time I write; my river. I thank her.

For in the end, it is not her strength that I admire so much but her letting it be seen, her wearing it like a second skin. She taught me that strength is not about being unbreakable; it is about being bendable, about being able to carry the world’s weight and keep going, and not have it crush your bones underneath. This, then, has become my impetus to write, to tell stories.