Are you familiar with the idea of masks and mask work? Most of what I know comes from Johnstone’s Impro (here’s a decent online review/summary), but the basic idea in theater comes from folk religion, where people wear masks and go into trances to temporarily become someone else. Traditionally humans used mask trances to embody what they believed were gods and spirits. Now people use mask trances to play characters on the stage.
What does this have to do with anything? Although the mask trance is an extreme form, there’s a sense in which we can wear masks to become different people in different situations. Most people do this a little bit, e.g. behave a bit differently with different people, and some people do it a medium amount, e.g. code switching, but you can learn to do it a lot.
This gives you the option to put up stronger boundaries between the person you are at work and home (and in other situations). Even just knowing about masks can help make it clearer how you can put down the mask you wear at work, say, when you get home, maybe by having a little ritual where you “take off your mask”. For example, think of Mr. Rodgers changing into his sweater when he “came home” and changing out of it when he “left home”.
It’s not exactly perfect, but it’s a technique that may help you deal with the transition between different contexts where you need to present a different persona to the world.
Are you familiar with the idea of masks and mask work? Most of what I know comes from Johnstone’s Impro (here’s a decent online review/summary), but the basic idea in theater comes from folk religion, where people wear masks and go into trances to temporarily become someone else. Traditionally humans used mask trances to embody what they believed were gods and spirits. Now people use mask trances to play characters on the stage.
What does this have to do with anything? Although the mask trance is an extreme form, there’s a sense in which we can wear masks to become different people in different situations. Most people do this a little bit, e.g. behave a bit differently with different people, and some people do it a medium amount, e.g. code switching, but you can learn to do it a lot.
This gives you the option to put up stronger boundaries between the person you are at work and home (and in other situations). Even just knowing about masks can help make it clearer how you can put down the mask you wear at work, say, when you get home, maybe by having a little ritual where you “take off your mask”. For example, think of Mr. Rodgers changing into his sweater when he “came home” and changing out of it when he “left home”.
It’s not exactly perfect, but it’s a technique that may help you deal with the transition between different contexts where you need to present a different persona to the world.
Wow thank you. This is amazing insight that fits perfectly into my model. I will find a way to implement this for a bit and see how it feels.