This is a copy of the newsletter that was sent out on Halloween, 2025.
What mask are you wearing today?
Today is Halloween, the one night of the year when you can walk down the street with fake blood on your face and a plastic knife sticking out of your head, and people still smile at you. No one mistakes it for real. Your awkward costume and clumsy behavior are forgiven. The mask allows freedom of expression, and everyone agrees to the rules of this social game. For one night, acting and pretending are celebrated out in the open. You choose who to be and play along with other people’s choices. You enjoy the trick because you know it’s a trick.
But here’s a fact we tend to ignore: tomorrow morning, once the makeup is washed off and the costumes are packed away, the pretending doesn’t stop. Every other day of the year, you still wear masks; only then they’re invisible.
You wear one when you talk to your boss, another when you sit down for coffee with a friend, another when you interact with your daughter, and yet another when you talk to yourself. You shift your tone, your posture, your intensity, and your words to fit what you believe each moment requires. The mask changes shape automatically, without conscious effort. You do it without thinking.
That happens because you’re not in direct contact with reality. You can’t be. Your senses gather only fragments of the infinite sensory experience happening outside your body, and your brain turns those fragments into something that feels complete but never is. What you see, hear, and feel isn’t the world as it is; it’s a translation filtered through distorted and generalized bits of memory, expectation, and emotion. You respond to your interpretation, not to reality itself, and that is how perception works for every human being.
Everything you experience is partial. Your eyes catch a narrow range of light particles. Your ears detect a thin slice of available vibrations. Your nose and tongue register only certain molecules, while most others pass unnoticed. Your skin senses pressure and temperature, but only within limits. Beyond those physiological boundaries lies an infinite field of information that never reaches your awareness. You move through a world reduced to what your nervous system can measure and process, and it’s only a fraction of what really goes on. Your mind fills in the gaps, mostly with fiction, so that your life story feels continuous.
To function and to survive another day, your mind builds an internal model of reality, a personalized and evolving transcript that ties the fragments together and gives them meaning. Your personal story, narrated by the voice in your head, adapts to your mental and physical state, memories, needs, desires, and fears.
Every thought and feeling you have ever had rests on that unstable foundation. When your ego intervenes, the narrative in your head becomes more intricate, and perhaps problematic. Your ego looks at this filtered internal representation of the world and decides how you should appear out there in “reality.” It selects the right mask for each setting. Around some people, you act confident or nonchalant. Around others, you’re shy or reserved, or what you might call “humble.” You might soften your opinions or exaggerate them, depending on what your ego expects will happen next. Each version feels authentic to you in the moment because your mind edits reality to fit your mental map.
Halloween is a reminder that life itself is a stage and we’re all performers. Tonight you can see in yourself, and in others, what usually stays hidden: the way people craft themselves for an audience and the relief that comes from showing a false face openly. The rest of the year, the same behavior continues under the surface. We keep performing, calling it professionalism, parenting, insecurity, or impulse.
You cannot remove every mask, and even if you could, you shouldn’t. You can’t perceive the raw world behind your filters, but you can remember that what feels solid in your mind is a construction shaped by perception. Your reactions often come from your projections, not from what is actually there. The more you realize this, the closer you get to reality and the more freedom you have to shape your life. Doubt is what keeps your eyes open when the story in your head tries to close them.
Bottom line: Stay curious all year, not just on Halloween.
I hope that’s helpful.
Cheers,
Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht
P.S. If you find yourself wondering how your perception shapes your personality, we’ve written a book that explores this in depth. It took us 18 years to complete, combining the latest research in neuroscience with our decades of work using these methods in private practice. It’s a practical guide to understanding and changing the inner patterns that shape how you think, feel, and act. Here it is: Change Your Personality: The Irreversible Method to Reinvent Yourself.