Mask Ramble

I'll let you in on a secret.

I came up for the idea of EP almost seven years ago. At the time, I was a sophomore in high school with an unhealthy dose of self-loathing. I hated my personality. My introvertedness seemed like a curse in an extroverted society. I was awkward with strangers. It always took me a long time to open up to anyone. This shyness had been present all through my childhood, but what I didn't realize until later was that my subconscious attempts at hiding my fear and looking confident turned me cold. People saw the mixture of confidence and silence as chilled aloofness. There are some girls who seem shy in a harmless way. Instead, my shyness had gained a hard edge and turned into intimidation. A weapon.

Charlotte became an extension of who I was in those miserable times. Like me, she was an introvert in an extroverted world. She was cast in the shadows of bright and loud people like Nicolette and Cassie, and she didn't know how to escape from the shadows. As an analogy, I extended her lack of self-esteem to her music. She may be a genius and a prodigy, but her stage-fright prevents her from realizing this full potential.

Rory served as a foil to Charlotte, because Rory was the type of girl I always envied. Confident, charming, outspoken, witty--an extrovert who thrives from people. When Charlotte begins to masquerade as Rory's ghost, in essence she tries to mask her insecurities by pretending to be someone else who compensates for those flaws.

In a way, I tried to do the same in my own life. My best friends in high school and college were both charming girls who were more extroverted than me. Whenever I was in an awkward social situation and wanted to dig myself into a hole and disappear, I would try to imagine how they would react in the same situation.

I thought I had overcome my fears and learned how to put the extrovert mask convincingly on while I was in college. Except something that happened yesterday knocked me backwards with the realization that, deep down, I still haven't changed at all. I've been parading around like a Rory for the last four years while Charlotte is still hiding underneath.