Lessons from Majora's Mask

It's been a very long time since I played The Legend of Zelda; Majora's Mask. I was far too young to catch many of the back-stories and underlying messages that are found within the game. However, I have been reading a number of articles that focus on exactly these things, and seeing how the author's bring out important and thought-provoking ideas has got me to thinking.

Perhaps the most influential lately has been the one titled The Illusion of Being Alone. I just read it, and I personally found it having a strong impact on me. A lot of what it said, of what it addressed, was a lot on what I have been thinking about lately.

I've never been quick to make friends or to grow close to people, despite the desire I've often had to do just that. Having moved several times in the last few years has made it that much harder for me to reach and out connect with those around me. I'm the type of person who, when I make a good friend, I tend to try to hold on as long as I can. I crave close friends.

With the most recent move, I have found myself in a position where I have felt alone. I've only felt this alone once before, years ago. It was an experience I hated, and I never wanted to repeat. Yet, here I have found myself in a similar situation, in a place that I know very little about, with no one around that I know really well or that I see on a regular basis. The few people who I know live out here I have either seen only briefly or not at all.

Combined with that has been a general silence from those I have called friends over the years. I believe, for the most part, it is not an intentional thing, merely the result of years passing, of aging, and of moving on. These are natural things in life, and I cannot begrudge them. Merely that it seems to have happened with everyone all at once. 

Some days have left me feeling empty and alone and desperate, just wanting to know that I've not been tossed aside. Other days, I don't worry about that for one reason or another. Sometimes I feel like no longer talking to those whom I have called friends, either to move on or to see if they even notice. And then I usually get my head back on straight, after a while.

I have felt loneliness, that emptiness. I know how hard it is to deal with, how it can be a corrupting influence, leading a person to do things they never thought they would ever do. How it can be a motivator to great things, too. And I can see that often, loneliness is a self-applied thing. Yes, it is true, I don't have the same level of friendships and connections I used to have, but how much of that is my fault and how much of that is the nature of life? I can't answer that, because I don't know. What I do know is that it is up to us to decide how we choose to respond when the that lonely feeling surrounds us like an unstoppable army. How do we, how do I, choose to respond and react?

Painful Learning

I think you get the picture (ha, get it?). This has been my weekend, so to speak, and I've felt like doing this multiple times. Why? I've been trying to clone my hard drive (make an exact copy from my current hard drive onto another to replace the old one), with limited success. I'll spare you the details.

However, throughout all this, I have learned a lot of things about computers, how they work, how they don't work, a tiny little bit about how and why they do what they do, and a whole lot about patience while waiting for my computer to finish doing whatever it was doing. Multiple times.

I won't claim to be an expert on cloning hard drives successfully (though if you ever need to, I recommend the DriveClone program found HERE; it worked well for me, more so than some others, though for cleaning off my hard drive, the EaseUS ToDo Backup tool worked alright - failed at successfully cloning, though.). However, I have gained a bit of insight into learning.

I studied education at BYU-I for years, and I learned a lot. Today, I learned even more. The best learning really does come after a lot of hard, and often painful and frustrating, work. It costs a lot of time, effort, sweat, tears, feelings of throwing things out of windows, praying, and all-around hoping that things actually work. But, eventually, you learn something. You learn how something works. How to do it right. How to make things not blow up. In the end, it really does end up worth it. Somehow.

Or maybe something more like this.

From Behind the Mask

So, I'm sure many of you have heard me talk about masks before, the idea of hiding behind them, or using them to help disguise how we feel, etc. Or even the idea that sometimes we become to attached to our masks that we start to become our mask (I'm sure there's a Majora's Mask reference in all this somewhere). It's all well and true, but today I wanted to think on something else. The idea that sometimes we hide behind a mask we hadn't even realized was a mask. At least, not fully.

I got this idea when I was challenged to day to change my facebook profile picture to a picture that was actually of me, and not of my avatar. This was done in the name of trying to encourage me to be more socially skilled, and maybe it'll help. That aside, it's left me thinking some. I'm not a huge fan of having my picture taken. No major reason. In fact, I used to be a lot less against it and used to ask people to take my picture in certain circumstances. That's changed over the last few years, and I've begun to wonder why.

I've changed in a lot of ways over the years, in many different areas of my life. Apparently somewhere in there, I picked up a desire to avoid being in front of the camera, preferring to be the one taking the pictures. Thinking on it today, when I was initially challenged to change my picture, my gut reaction was "No way!" Then I paused and thought, just a little, why? Why was I so against changing my picture? Why would I prefer to have my avatar dude, as cool as he is, represent me to the world at large? That's not me, that's not how I look or dress (anymore, it's based off one of the uniforms I used to wear at a former job). It's not even how I act, really. Maybe it was who I wished I was? Was I using it as a pseudo-escape, an imagining of something other than what I perceive myself to be?

This comes in the wake of some other interesting revelations and realizations that I won't share here, but suffice to say, have left me thinking about a lot of things. One big one I will share is that of self-image, how I see myself. It's with that in mind that I have been approaching this picture/mask idea. I think it's quite possible that I turned my avatar into the mask it appears to be, not just because a guy standing there looking intimidating (as intimidating as a Minecraft-esk character can be) with a bow is cool, but because it wasn't me. It was something different, something that to me embodied hopes and dreams of maybe who I could be, not who I was, or who I perceived myself to be.

Hiding behind masks is nothing new, especially for me. But this one caught me by surprise. I can't say that I won't continue to hide behind masks now and again, but I am hopeful that now I can see a bit more of who I am, and see myself when I am moving to hide behind a mask without realizing it. Being me is something that I need to work on more, and stop hiding behind the many faces I'd rather others see.