Gately and Joelle talk veil and U.H.I.D. — "What you do is you hide…"
‘What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others. You stick your hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd’s visual meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra gregarious and outgoing and exert yourself to appear totally unaware of the facial struggles of people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that they can see that you’re hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your deformity. You take your desire to hide and conceal it under a mask of acceptance.’
Context
The pre-U.H.I.D. pathology the veil is meant to cure: performed unselfconsciousness, the too-wide smile worn into the "visual meatgrinder." A mask made of your own face — which is why the Union's literal cloth mask reads, in doctrine, as the more honest article. Carlisle catalogues the smile-as-mask into his smiley-face system.