We all put up a front. We wear any number of masks—one that covers up our pain, our fears, our doubts, perhaps even one that displays the person that we truly are, but that might be frowned upon by our religion, our culture, our gender.

This quote from the comedian Michael Ian Black in his powerful little book, A Better Man (we have copies available at the Painted Porch), might strike you as familiar…even if you’re not a man or a comedian.

“For years, I was one of those guys. I cultivated an entire comedic persona based on withdrawal. If you ever want to see what that looks like, go watch me on one of those VH1 shows…My segments are all totally deadpan, unsmiling, sarcastic. They were funny (if I do say so myself), but sarcasm is a form of withdrawal. I was good at it because by that point in my life, I had invested years learning how to act as if I didn’t care about a thing. What you see on TV is an exaggeration of the way I lived my life, but only a little. I had so much anger back then that I didn’t know what to do with, so I clamped down. My release was jokes. They escaped like occasional steam puffs shaking the lid from a boiling pot.”

Maybe this describes your own parent, who buried their emotions so deeply they couldn’t recover them, even when they tried. Or perhaps it describes you—withdrawing, no, fleeing—from how having kids has opened us up. It’s scary. It’s hard. So you hide behind work or gruffness or some idealized image of what a tough, strong parent should be.

Michael Ian Black eventually realized his act couldn’t last. “I knew there was something fundamentally dishonest about it,” he writes. It wasn’t his true self. It wasn’t who he was meant to be. It wasn’t who his family needed him to be. Through work, time, and vulnerability, he connected with his authentic self. The result wasn’t just his book, but a home where honesty prevails—one that, hopefully, won’t sentence his children to wear the same masks worn by the generation before.