"There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet..."

For me, one of the most fascinating parts of life is when I stumble upon some disparate pieces surprisingly and suddenly fitting together.

Interestingly enough, I read Eliot’s Prufrock when I was a middle schooler and De Regniers A Little House of Your Own, as a parent to my daughter. But the message that we often consciously or subconsciously prepare faces to hide behind is definitely similar. And we do that for a myriad of reasons: protection, fitting in, satisfaction, etc.

But the plain and simple truth is that often we do it because we simply do not know what our true face is.

We may have learned, through trial and torture, that what we had known our face to be was simply not acceptable. We may have learned, through society and comparison, that our own face was not up to standards.

But whatever the cause, the fact that we have unlearned our faces, necessitates the creating of new ones. And many of us spend a large chunk of our lives trying on different faces to fit into the situations of our lives.

When do we settle into the face, or ‘false face’, that we decide is the us we want to project to the world? Are those who are gifted faces of which the world admires exempt from this uncertainty? Or does age just have the final and trumping determination? Or do we never fully decide on one permanent face with which to greet the world?

Without questioning ourselves, perhaps we might never recognize and greet our own faces.