Keeping Up Appearances is Killing Us.

Suicide looks like a smile wrapped up in charisma.

A soul with their heart on their sleeve, ready to make anyone laugh.

The center of the room, the life of the party, the shiniest star in the sky.

Their outer world organized like a fine shelf of trinkets, dusted and immaculately placed.

When we scan the room for the one we worry about, we look to the shaded corners, not the spotlight.

The fact is, the one who has created the outer world that sparkles feels as though they cannot crack your image of them to tell you they’re not okay.

The effort it takes to build that facade is far less than the effort it would take to pull back the curtain and show the truth.

It was built to protect them, to sheild you from the truth — and from themselves. To take that away feels like a fate worse than death.

What they didn’t realize is that in building that wall, they trapped you out, and trapped them in.

Alone.

With only their mind to trick them.

Their mind can now spin without anyone to stop it. The walls within echo endless lies. Lies that tell them it will never stop, there is no way out, no one wants them, they don’t matter. And no one is there to clear the air.

These lies grow until there is no silence.

Eventually feeling good becomes an impossibility where it was once a chore.

An unending mountain climb that they begin each day. They remember the days when they used to climb to the top and beat it, then they grew tired and could only make it halfway before the day was over. Then, they woke up at the bottom, with no will to try again.

We are ignorantly surprised when someone else leaves us by their own hand, but we know that we’ve all worn a smile when we didn’t smile on the inside. We’ve all said we’re fine when we’re not. We’ve all put out an image that does not show our truths.

When we stop doing that, we will create a world with less showmanship and more heart. When you show up as you, and not as you think I want you to be, and me as I am and not as I think you want me to be, we will find ourselves living on the same side of the wall with open curtains between us.

For this is the love we’ve lost. The connection to each other. And that connection requires us all to be honest with each other, being honest with ourselves and questioning every thought that keeps us apart.

This world has become a place where our fingers lay over the killswitch that we don’t see. We have the power to love one another into healing, wholeness and connection again. But we’d rather be right, belong, and keep up appearances.

When will we see that as we separate the ground between us, we are at risk of being swallowed through the cracks?