I encountered this figure while walking through the Harrison Antique Store, moving slowly between aisles dense with memory. The space held the quiet weight of objects that had outlived their original owners, furniture, tools, garments, fragments of domestic and working lives. Then, suddenly, this figure appeared. Seated, composed, almost waiting. The mask drew me first. Its fixed smile, exaggerated and theatrical, carried a tension that felt both performative and hollow. In colour, the red markings were vivid, insistent. Yet I chose to render the image in black and white. The removal of colour shifted the encounter. What once felt loud became contemplative. The grin softened into ambiguity. The figure moved from spectacle into stillness.

I read the image as an artifact of performed identity. Masks conceal, and they also reveal, showing us what a culture fears, what it laughs at, what it exaggerates. Antique stores are repositories of these layered performances. They hold the costumes, tools, and symbols through which people once constructed their lives. Goffman (1959) argued that social life is like a stage, where we play roles and manage the impressions we create. For precarious workers, as I reflected in my 30 Days by the Sea inquiry into alonetude (Tucker, 2026), the stakes of performance are particularly high. We perform competence, enthusiasm, and wellness because our livelihoods depend on it. Hochschild (2012) calls this emotional labour, the work of managing one’s own feelings to fulfill the requirements of a job. Looking at this masked figure, I felt the accumulated weight of that performance. Twenty-five years of smiling through precarity. Twenty-five years of the fixed grin.

I was struck by the posture, relaxed, almost casual, as though the figure had settled into the role permanently. The longer I stood there, the more it felt less like an object for sale and more like a witness to time passing through the store. A quiet observer of those who come searching for pieces of the past. Photographing it became an act of pause. A recognition that identity, like antiques, is layered, worn, and often curated for display. Nash (2004) describes Scholarly Personal Narrative as the practice of noticing how the self is implicated in what it studies. I was implicated in this mask. I knew this figure. I had worn something like it for a very long time.

The black and white treatment honours the temporal quality of performance and its costs. It places the figure outside the immediacy of the present and situates it within a continuum of memory, performance, and cultural storytelling. Van der Kolk (2014) writes that the body keeps the score of every performance it has been required to give. This mask holds that kind of score, fixed in its grin, settled into its posture, patient in its waiting. Porges (2011) describes the freeze response as the nervous system’s last resort when neither fight nor flight is possible. I wonder, looking at this figure, how much of what I called resilience in my academic career was actually freeze, a fixed smile, an adaptive stillness, a body that had learned that stopping was prohibited. The alonetude inquiry I have been undertaking in Loreto (Tucker, 2026) is, in part, an effort to let the mask come off quietly, without drama, in the way that old things soften when they are finally allowed to rest.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, Harrison Antique Store, February 2026

References

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.

Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.

Tucker, A. (2026). 30 Days by the Sea: A research inquiry into the third shore [Blog]. https://thirdshore.trubox.ca

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.