Do I really know you...

The recent and sudden passing of a close collegue left me with more questions than answers as well as a deep sadness of knowing that there is more like him among us. You see he was the kind of person who knew and was known by everybody on the floor and I'm sure in the other departments as well. He made it his business to playfully annoy people, and however hard you tried you could not ignore him, and his antics always cheered people up and made most feel better. I remember when I had suffered a loss some two years, when I got back to work he was one of the few people who came and sat with me and offered not just condolences but some advice on how to deal with the pain etc. And now to hear that he took his own life is unimaginable, because he was the kind of person you would expect to be able to deal with problems differently. As we sat and talked about how he had impacted our lives at work I couldn't help but wonder if we knew him at all, and how much did he really show os, the world. And that brings me back to the masks, sometimes we wear these masks so well it becomes difficult to separate our identity from them. Or just because people around have perceived me to be a certain way it becomes difficult for me to reveal my true self. In this case of my colleague I would guess that as we had known him as the jovial, jokster it became hard for him to be able to open up and say when he was hurting. Sometimes life casts us into a mould and we become afraid of getting out and disappointing those who know us as such, we end up developing double lives.
I am not in any way attempting to explain the psychology of suicide nor am I purporting to understand complex human behaviour and relationships. All I'm saying is sometimes the people around us,whom we interact with regularly may find themselves forced to be something they really are not in order to fit societal expectations. We too may find ourselves being pressured into behaving in a certain to please those around us, but the best one can do is to be themselves, because after all how much do I really know the next person.