My Face Won’t Shut Up

It has to be hours accrued now of my fascia and toxin release spiraling out over the past 18 months. My face won’t shut up — only because I’m allowing it to speak for the first time in 20 or so years. 

What the hell am I talking about?

I’m talking about masking. Micro-manipulations along our journeys, being slightly dishonest with yourself about how something went, or how you were treated, or how much an experience impacted you. To be blunt about it — masking is lying. It’s lying to yourself about your own life. Where lying makes us weak. And we mirror one another.. see where I’m going with this?

Your body keeps the score and where this applies for artists, vocalists and creatives is: if you “mask” you put up a facade and a perfect image for the world to see because for whatever reason that’s how you’ve adapted to being “safe”. But what this is doing is creating blocks of emotion and energy in your system. When you create these blocks of emotion and energy in your system, your creativity and artistry pivots toward a coping and reactive practice — as opposed to an intentional, ever-growing trajectory.

Being scapegoated robs you of your identity. When you’re a scapegoat, your understanding of who you are is defined by the desires of someone else. The understanding of who you are is essentially a stuffing or punching bag, or both, for someone else to use whenever needed for nervous system regulation and coping. In the process, you look to fill the needs of that person or persons, and “live out” the life they are desiring or imposing on you. You in turn, become a shell of a human being, lacking little substance of the self, assertion in your autonomy, and a true identity. 

Then, if you experience trauma along with, or outside of this and the trauma itself is dismissed or overlooked by yourself or others, your system has no option but to “mask”. Pretend everything is fine, because there are no resources or provisions being made for you to process the trauma in real time. What does this do to your face? Yes, your actual face.  Forehead ones, elevens, grief lines, jowls, jaw tension, gum recession, knots in the muscle and fascia, dark under eyes, cortisol build up, even a tight scalp and hair loss. In short, it kinda makes you ugly, with an aura that is automatically deterred by others who are comfortable in their skin. 

Spicy stuff? I’m pretty passionate about this topic. To clarify: regardless of whatever trauma you’ve been through, you are a beautiful human! My focus is on the psychological trauma and covert narcissism that leads to masking for the individual on the receiving end. And while looks aren’t the most important thing in life, respecting the inner work around curating your unique beauty isn’t just a healthy life practice, it’s godly. Honestly, a great measure of godliness and righteousness is in how well you take care of and protect the body you live in.

A quick note on metaphysics — if you struggle with anxiety, depression or dissociation, that doesn’t mean something is wrong with you or your body — it means your mind has too many ANTs (automatic negative thoughts). It means that your body is at max capacity for entertaining those ANTs and/or any spirits of darkness that cause the anxiety and mental stress. It means your body got trained to operate this way. The good news is, you can train it another way.

To take a look further, if your body is working within its design you wouldn’t have anxiety or dissociation. You’d be breathing the oxygen you need, regularly, in a rhythm and flow with life, because oxygen, at least as far as we know, is an in-expendable resource. We can’t run out of it. And if you’re like me and believe God is literally everywhere. Oxygen is the Holy Spirit. Or if you just want to take it as a metaphor, oxygen is the Holy Spirit we need for our brains and bodies to operate at a solid baseline and beyond (never under). 

So when it comes to masking then, when we manipulate the truth of an experience and pretend it’s not a big enough deal to speak up about or process — our minds process that as data processing. Meaning, you train your face to keep smiling, even though you’d rather verbally bite someone’s head off. Maybe don’t do that, unless it’s a justified “bully the bully” situation. What I’m getting to though is this: the smile isn’t genuine, which means the eyes won’t shine and the muscles in your face will contort, over time. Did you know that when happiness fires in your brain, it’s literally because of a walking protein? A protein that walks, like it has two legs, carrying/dragging a bag of endorphins to your parietal cortex. Now imagine smiling a fake smile through pain, and that protein doesn’t get to walk to the cortex. We begin to train ourselves that happiness is something other than what it really is. And honestly? We do it too much, we begin to forget what it is we even love that makes us happy. 

That’s why I write — so you don’t. 

-B

If you’re someone who is looking to reconnect with your own happiness, stop masking or rewire aspects of your subconscious mind, I’d like to invite you into Amplify Your Voice, a 6-week holistic voice coaching program. After masking to survive for a large majority of my life, seeing how damaging that was to my career and aspirations,  I realized I didn’t have to live that way anymore. From recovering a 15-year suppressed memory through voice-work, self-coaching and a little bit of music (it’s the spoonful of sugar!), I created this 40-day reset for you to improve the psychology behind your artistry. Click anywhere in this paragraph to learn more.