We have all come across those people who love to tell us how they “don’t have a filter.” Our knee-jerk reaction to this proclamation might be to admire their capacity to be honest, but it does not take very long to find out that they aren’t fooling anybody, are they? To say that you do not have a filter would mean that there is never a situation in which you do not say what you think or feel. If this were the case, your boss would have fired you long ago for calling him or her a prick or a bitch. Why hasn’t this person without a filter said such things? After all, we have been informed that they don’t have one. I recently read an article written by AJ Jacobs entitled, “I Think You’re Fat.” The article is about the idea of radical honesty. Basically, if a man puts the idea of radical honesty into practice, he just walks around all day telling women that he wants to sleep with them. Every now and then, that can work, but unless you look like Channing Tatum, you are going to get punched in the face, or maybe the Cops will be called on you. Neither one a desired outcome. Although, I will say that it does feel somewhat liberating to just say it straight away. You kind of feel how Joe Kelly must feel when he’s on the mound. “I’m going to throw this baseball as hard as I can, but I have no idea where the fuck it’s going. Hope it works out!” Point being, if that worked out well for us, then we would do it, but it doesn’t. So, we don’t. However, I believe it is more respectable to do that and get punched in the face for it than to tell anybody that will listen how you do not have a filter when that statement is simultaneously a lie. In the case of the latter, you’re just talking shit, and talking shit all the time is not honesty. Announcing to the world that you do not have a filter is a lie because that would mean that you tell the truth one hundred percent of the time, and you wouldn’t dare.
I was talking to my cousin one time about a particular intrusive thought I had about driving by someone riding a bicycle on the side of the road. “Oh my God, I could totally wreck this guy’s whole shit if I just swerved into him.” Where the hell did that even come from!? It’s not like I would ever do that, but I thought it anyway. In the end, we shared a laugh about it because he had thought the same thing once, and we both realized the absurdity of the mind. My favorite comedian Patrice O’Neal once shared a story about how a woman asked him to hold her baby while he was on a basketball court. He said that all he could think about doing was launching the woman’s baby up for three. (LOL.) Patrice attributed not actually Logo-Lillard’ing the woman’s baby to that the vast majority of people take a proverbial ‘sanity pill’ every morning when they wake up. These two examples end up being rather comical in the end, but the rabbit hole gets a lot darker the deeper you go down it. There is a woman who has made herself a kind of arch-nemesis of my family. I’m not sure of her name, nor do I care to learn it, but we can refer to her as ‘beach-house lady.’ Bitch-house lady, maybe. Without going into any details (Quite frankly, I’m afraid to in the off chance that she reads this), B-H-L is an evil, vindictive, manipulating woman who would steal the fire extinguishers from a burning daycare if it meant she could benefit from it. The stress and anguish that BHL has caused the members of my family has led me to spend significant time thinking about going full Tonya Harding on her. Do I have the capacity to actually do such a thing? My family is not the only family that BHL has agonized. A lot of people would be more than happy to find out that BHL got her knees piped. Two things that I know for sure are that the only time I would ever discuss such a thing is with people who already feel the same or if I’m trying to drive home a point on my new website. That point is that the people wearing the ‘badge of honor’ of not having a filter are lying because, yes, they do. And thank God for it. Without it, the social contract that we all agreed upon that states that we will do our best to not be pieces of shit is broken. When enough people breach that contract, society turns into sheer anarchy and falls apart.
Most Mexican wrestlers wear masks. The reason they do this is to purport the image of being a superstar, a hero, or even a God. Some luchadores are looked at as such in Mexico. The mask becomes their whole entire identity. Their whole entire Being. It is because of this reason that championship belts are not the most prominent aspect of Lucha libre but rather the mask itself. There is a powerful idea behind when a luchador is de-masked. He loses the identity of the superstar, hero, or God that he created. It’s a tragic event. A ‘holy shit’ moment. He is Adam after the forbidden fruit has been eaten. Vulnerable, naked, afraid, guilty, ashamed, sinful. What he never wanted the world to see has now been seen. The realization that he is not the person he has been pretending to be has sunk in. That is not a fun realization to have. I’ve come to that realization fairly recently. At 31, realizing that everything I thought I was, everything I thought I believed in, was dead wood. How will the luchador ever recover? Well, he can find solace in that at least he doesn’t have to pretend anymore. Also, he now knows that everyone else who is wearing a mask is simply that: wearing a mask. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are only showing you the highlights. Being de-masked is a humbling experience, but a liberating one at that. From this position of vulnerability and humiliation, true growth can begin. Without a mask. Fuck COVID.
Beginning this journey of trying to grow truthfully is frightening. It is filled with many uncomfortable questions that you’ll have to confront. I mention at the bottom of these pieces that I may use pronouns such as ‘we’ or ‘you,’ but I’m talking about me. At least, I’m talking about me as well. I’m dealing with these things now. We have the knowledge that society will always, eventually, call out and kill the fake version of ourselves. When this happens, you have two options 1) create another masked version of yourself, or 2) do your best to find out just who indeed is the real you and then reveal that person. Whoever that is. We have established that the former will never work, so we better choose the latter. Again, it’s terrifying. What happens if people don’t like that person? Well, they may not. But, you can live with that because more often than not, those people that won’t like you aren’t even them themselves. In my most recent piece, I wrote about how when I’m playing basketball, I can live with missing the shot when I make sure my mechanics are correct, but the ball goes halfway down and rattles back out. Sometimes you’ll get screwed over, or somebody will reject you, but at least they rejected YOU. If they fucked over or rejected the masked version of you, then you didn’t even fucking try.
One of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is to clean your room before you go out and criticize the world. It’s a profound idea that I am going to piggyback off of: Before you tell the world that you have no filter or that you do not wear a mask, you better be sure that you’ve washed your fucking face. Otherwise, as it will inevitably do, society will reveal your true face for you, and now you are caught out there looking really funny or ugly in the light. Maybe you have a grotesque amount of acne; maybe you got scars, dirt, grease, a beard, and astigmatism.. Wait, what? Before society brings you to your knees for all your bullshit, you can take the mask off of yourself. You can see your defects, imperfections, or acne and scars for the analogy’s sake and start to clean yourself up. From here, and only from here, can you even start to think about telling the world what you actually think. Even after you’ve washed up, a car may drive by a puddle and splash mud all over your face, or you might get shit on by a bird, or someone may pie you. That’s okay. You’ll still be wrong a lot, but you can always go back and wash up.
