Taking the Mask Off

For a long time, I did what most of us do.
I smiled. I said I was fine. I kept things moving.

Attempting to make my life from outside look normal. Maybe even good. But underneath, there was this quiet pressure to keep everything looking okay — even when it wasn’t.

That all fell apart in the Fall of 2023. Not only did the people in my community see that our life was not so “perfect”, but so did the world. People across the globe got a glimpse of the chaotic life we were living. 

But what they saw and heard, was so far from the truth it seemed impossible to turn it around. Yes, my life was not perfect, but being wrongfully conceived in the public eye was maybe the best thing I could have ever experienced. 

As traumatic as it was, not being able to hide, I realized how exhausting the pretending and performing was. The careful editing of what we let the world see.

The truth is, life is beautiful and messy and hard and meaningful all at the same time. And yet so many of us walk around wearing masks, afraid that if we show what’s really going on, it will be too much. Well, it is too much for some people, those are not your people. 

Lately, I’ve been asking myself a simple question:

What would life look like if I stopped pretending?

Not dramatic honesty. Not oversharing everything. My life was wrongfully over shared in the public eye…But a quieter kind of truth — where I admit when things are hard, where I stop performing “fine,” where I let life be what it actually is.

This blog is my small experiment in that.

A place to write about the real parts of life.
The questions. The growth. The struggles. The trauma. The things we carry, that nobody sees.
The moments when we realize we’re not alone after all.

Maybe taking the mask off doesn’t mean having all the answers.

Maybe it just means telling the truth about where we are.