What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else....Little by little we come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing.
—Frederick Buechner
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A.K.A. The Mask . . . which I'm trying more and more not to wear.
Like the Velveteen Rabbit
...For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise experienced like the Skin Horse understood all about it.
"What's real?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become REAL."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. that why it doesn't happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of you hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
"I suppose you are Real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
"The boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."
Here's to "always."
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