It’s a terrible thing to be alone - yes it is - it is - but don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath - as terrible as you like - but a mask.

Mansfield frames loneliness as both painful and dangerous: the absence of companionship can tempt a person to drop the social “mask” that makes life bearable. The repeated insistence—“yes it is - it is -”—suggests an intimate, almost confessional recognition of solitude’s weight. Yet the counsel is not to abandon masking altogether, but to replace one mask with another, implying that identity is layered, performed, and strategically managed. The line can be read as a bleakly pragmatic view of self-protection: even authenticity may require a constructed persona, because exposure without preparation leaves one vulnerable to despair, judgment, or emotional collapse.