Unmasking

You agree to dinner when you’re too exhausted to talk. At work, you swallow a cruel joke because you need the person telling it to think well of you. Each compromise has its reasons. After years of making them, though, you may struggle to recognize the life they have added up to.

In Unmasking: What We Lose by Pretending – and How We Get It Back, therapist Essy Knopf explores the uncomfortable bargains we make to be accepted. He writes about masking with the insight of a clinician and the candor of someone who has spent much of his own life doing it.

Through fictional characters struggling with masking, Knopf explores how the effort to remain accepted can leave us hiding even from those closest to us. Psychology and sociology help explain why these habits are so difficult to break, while the lives of people who pushed back, including Pauli Murray and Judith Heumann, show what becomes possible when people challenge the terms of their acceptance.

For anyone who has spent years becoming easier for others to accept, Unmasking asks what that effort has cost – and where you still have room to choose differently.