THE MASK

Before any of this — before the dragonflies, before the signs, before the unraveling of everything I thought was stable — I lived a lot of my married life behind a mask.

Not intentionally. Not maliciously. Just... protectively. I didn’t realize it then, but I do now.

I was terrified of disrupting peace, even when the peace wasn’t real. I learned to swallow discomfort instead of speak it, to keep the air calm even if it meant tying knots in my own chest. I became so good at pushing things down that I could convince myself they didn’t hurt — not really, not enough to make a scene.

And when I did make a scene, it was at my own expense. I could just take it on myself so no one else had to feel the way I did. I hid my wounds behind humor. Behind busyness. Behind perfectionism. And on the hardest days, I hid behind too much alcohol.

It was a tactic that didn’t work. I did it to stay quiet, to stay small, to stay easy — but it rarely ended with me being any of those things. It ended in disruption, at my expense.

It was a way of coping. It was also a way of disappearing.

Because if I stayed the “fun one,” the “light one,” the one who laughed things off, the one things could be pinned on — then no one would have to face the things that were actually breaking me. No one would have to deal with the real problems.

Instead, I became the problem. The immature one. The one it was easy to say “couldn’t handle things” or “took things too personally.”

It was safer, in a sad way, to let people believe that. It protected their comfort at the expense of my own humanity.

I didn’t even realize how much of myself I had buried until the universe began pulling everything to the surface — fast. My healing journey didn’t begin gently. It didn’t unfold slowly or gradually. It came in a wave, loud and undeniable, and I believe now that God allowed it to happen exactly that way.

Because if He had waited for me to take the first step, I never would have moved.

The truth is: I have spent far more years injured in my marriage than I have spent healing. I have lived more married days surviving than growing. I have walked through far more silence than expression.

But now — finally — the pain is not being shoved into the shadows. The truth is not being forced into the dark corners of my heart. The real me is stepping forward, shaky but determined.

And my healing? It has only just begun.

It may be happening quickly, almost overwhelmingly so, but I no longer see that as chaos. I see it as divine timing. A breaking open that had to happen so I could finally see myself clearly — without the mask, without the numbing, without the performance.

For the first time in my married life, I am not choosing peace at the cost of myself.

I am choosing truth. I am choosing strength. I am choosing me.

And that choice is rewriting everything.