BEDA VIII

Once upon a fairly recent time, there was a girl. Her name was Enid. Enid was a fairly intelligent girl, able to think and make her thoughts known. She had a perfect amount of friends of varying degrees of nerdiness, and a difficult time keeping the verbs in written stories in the past tense.

Eventually, Enid realized that she interacted with her various groups of friends as if behind a veil, obfuscating her true personality. Her sporty friends all thought she was adorable, for she was a bit shy around them, unwilling to pull back the veil. Her academically inclined friends saw in her a smart girl who was too much of a lazyass for her own good, for she failed to move the veil enough for them to see the ways she passed her time, fearing judgement. She kept the veil on around the friends of her friends, for she was unsure how to behave around people she hardly knew. Then came her nerdy friends. Her veil was still on, because the fear of judgement persisted.

Then a revelation came. Enid found herself in the works of others. She found herself in the Internet, and in music, and more in books than she ever had before. She now had true passions, things she loved and loved to talk about. This was her greatest change, drawing the veil back from herself. She saw herself clearly, flaws and all, and saw plainly her deceptions. She saw the need to pull the veil back from anyone who was fooled by it, and started on the path. Following it, she found that others had been living behind veils, that they were not who they showed to the world. She found that so many people were like her, veiled in fear of judgement, and once she began taking her veil, others followed. And the exposed had never been happier.