There is nothing clean about unmasking. Nothing tidy or graceful about the moment you decide to stop performing and start speaking your truth. It is rough. It is raw. And it will cost you something.
But here is what I have learned sitting in my own pause, doing the hard and necessary work of understanding where I am: the way people receive your truth is so telling. Not of you. Of them. Of where they are. Of what they can hold.
You can speak with no bad intentions. You can offer your honesty like an open hand. And still, people will flinch. They will misread it. They will project their own unfinished work onto your words. That is not your burden to carry.
I sit in my pause because I understand. I understand that people are on their own journeys. Some are searching for themselves. Some are searching for answers. Some are just trying to survive another day in a world that keeps demanding performance over presence. I get it. I empathize with it deeply.
But here is the thing we need to say out loud: so much of our peace is lost the moment we hand it over to other people. To how they feel. How they receive. How they think. How they respond. We contort ourselves into shapes that aren’t ours just to manage someone else’s comfort. And for what?
I think about all of us going through this. The ones unmasking for the first time and feeling the full weight of it. The ones speaking their truth with shaking hands and a racing heartbeat, knowing the outcome might not be great, because people can only receive what they are capable of receiving. The anxiety of that knowing is real. It lives in the body.
And when I zoom out and look at the state of things, at where we are collectively, I have no polished words for it. Mental health is being gutted on every level. Soul health.
Human beings are struggling in ways we keep tiptoeing around instead of naming. We give our peace away to other broken human beings. And then we give our power away, letting those same broken humans lead us to the next broken human. And we just keep going. Talking about everything except the fact that we are breaking down.
So today I am not editing myself. I am just saying it.
What a world.
What a beautiful, broken, ridiculous world where we have normalized handing our peace to people who cannot even hold their own. Where speaking your truth still feels like a radical act. Where unmasking is met with confusion instead of curiosity.
But I will keep unmasking. I will keep sitting in my pause. I will keep choosing truth over performance, even when the reception is messy. Because the alternative is silence, and silence was never peace. It was just a slower way of disappearing.
Your truth is yours. Speak it. Let the reception tell you everything you need to know. And then keep going.
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