My name means Twin. Thomas comes from Didymus, which means Twin. I’m not sure what that means in the grand scheme of things. I’m my own twin? I hold the potentiality of a twin?

In the Christian tradition, Thomas was an apostle. Some Gnostic readings refer to him as Jesus’s twin. Canon maligns him as a doubter. I like to see him as a thinker. I’m a bit of a thinker myself.

Why do they malign doubt? He who is without doubt can cast the first stone… if he’s sure it’s really a stone. It might be petrified cow dung… it could be lava, it could be an ancient artifact… how can you be sure? And once you’ve cast that “stone” how can you be sure that it will land where you intend? Have you fully checked your background? Sure, you have confidence in your arm, but are you truly sure? Surely, I can’t be serious but I am. And you can call me Shirley because I’m far from sure that it’s not my name but I’m farther from sure that it is.

Anywho, Thomas. Didymus. Dally more.

So, the great unveiling… the unmasking of the twin.

When you decide, after forty-seven years, to fullycompletelyunabashedly remove your mask, the first wave of fear is that the world will see you differently. Well, the joke was on me on that one because it turns out that my mask was a lot more transparent than I thought. It was one of those things where most of the people who truly know me knew I was wearing a mask before I did. It’s like being naked your whole life thinking you were clothed. Yikes.

But the real clarity comes from the fact that even though it was a crappy mask, it was blocking my senses more than anything. Ineffective at protecting me, it did a pretty good job of obfuscating my perception.

Unmasking, to me, is realizing that forty-seven-and-counting years of repression has been akin to Clark Kent living with a piece of Kryptonite wedge into his heart.

Blessings and curses, curses and blessings… hypersensitivity to the connections in the world, the quick trainofthought of the neurospicy mind… these were locked away in a casket of shame.

I feel like Peter Parker when he started to embrace his new powers… clumsily slinging webs and climbing walls, giggling in delight at these things I can do…