Pretend you’re good at it

I read this quote once that I find myself coming back to every once and a while. It goes like this…

After all the heartache and pain
Still be soft
Still be Kind
Still be Hopeful
Still be magical
Still be whole
Still be present
Still be honest
Still be loving
Still be accepting
Still be you

Such a wonderful sentiment and I used to worry about the fact that sometimes I really do need to go back and read this to remind myself that those are very important ideals to have and practice. Because it’s so easy to let the harshness of the world with the pain others have caused to change the way you feel and act. So many people walk around with this inside them and it can leak out in a very slow and hurtful way, and others have the inability to hold it in at all and it rushes out like a broken dam holding back this enormous amount of pressure. Yes, in the past I have been guilty of both of these things and it certainly is something I look back at with some shame and embarrassment.

Then I taught myself how to pretend to be these things when I was suffering thru pain and heartaches, I didn’t want the outside world to know who I was at those moments. Then I realized I was adding this whole other level of guilt and shame because I had to fake something and pretend to be someone I truly wasn’t. I would pull back from the people in my life that cared about me. I would find myself sliding down into this dark hole of despair and loneliness. I wouldn’t ask for help, and if people reached out to me I would pretend everything was just fine. I got so good at it.

However , doing so would give me the time to settle down, think about the pain and the person or situation that was putting me in this spot and work on myself. Usually sitting down with my computer(in the past was pencil and notepad) and writing these feelings down was a way to let all this hurt escape through my fingertips and transfer it to something outside of me, something I could go back and read on a screen. Doing so would release me from the pain. In a way seeing the pain from the outside in and looking at that person suffering as someone that needed some comfort.

This was something that I became so good at, being able to take all that pain and make it into something that would protect the ones that I loved. I then realized that being able to “pretend you’re good at it” was such a wonderful trait to have and was the catalyst to my healing and truly being happy.