**Keeping Masks**

Masks come in all shapes and sizes. There are so many variations that you cannot be quite sure that the faces seen everyday are real. Sometimes masks are the only way to protect us from doing harm to others or oneself. Of all the masks that people wear, it is the invisible ones that we treasure the most.

We may hide behind our profession or professionalism in the futile hopes that no one will notice. Unfortunately, there is always someone who has known you for so long that they can sense when you are hiding something. Some will constantly say something to get you to open up and talk, and then there are the ones that just observe, slowly putting two and two together in the effort to have all the pieces of the puzzle before taking you one on one. Of course, there is also the one who uses both tactics for different reasons, and they are the ones to really watch out for. They are the ones that can slowly inch themselves closer and closer to the truth, and, without actually arriving at it, break in and steal the mask that you are holding most tightly.

I am on an almost constant vigil to keep the mask that I hold most dear because if I lose it, I don't know what I will do. It has become such a large part of who I am that the cracks that have formed are beginning to worry me. Some of the cracks are getting to be so large that I don't know if I can fix it. What worries me most is that some of the cracks I don't want to fix; they've been there so long that I couldn't imagine my mask without them.

But each crack also comes from someone that has earned their right to make that crack. The deep ones are the hardest for me to look at, especially ones that form almost over night. The more shallow ones are easier; some are mere scratches on the surface that came from glancing blows. The deep ones however started as a tiny pinprick and over time eroded into the crack they are now.

Despite the memories that accompany my mask, I find that a part of me wishes to just begin anew. But in my attempts to throw it away and forge a newer, stronger one, I find that who I have become may irretrievably be lost and that is not a good thing.

So I look at myself in the mirror and decide to just build new reinforcements and hope that in spite of all the banging away that those I work with continually do, I will be able to keep my mask. But in the end, I realize that every effort I make to retain my mask will only result in another piece being chipped away. This may be a losing fight, but I will hold on for as long as possible.