The Courage to Stop Pretending

The hardest part wasn’t admitting that I had been performing.
It was deciding what to do with that truth.

Awareness is one thing. It cracks the shell of illusion. But courage is what helps you crawl out of it.

Once you realize you’ve been performing, it’s impossible to unsee it. You start noticing the ways you soften your opinions, the times you laugh when something isn’t funny, the way you rush to make other people comfortable even when it costs you your peace.

You start seeing the difference between kindness and appeasement. Between empathy and erasure. Between connection and approval.

And at first, it feels impossible to choose differently.

Because courage isn’t always about doing something bold or public. Sometimes it’s as quiet as telling the truth in a room where you used to stay silent. Sometimes it’s choosing not to explain yourself. Sometimes it’s sitting in the discomfort of being misunderstood.

That kind of courage is small on the outside but seismic on the inside.

When I first started practicing honesty, it wasn’t graceful. I stumbled through conversations, overcorrected, apologized too much, then not enough. I wanted to be real, but I was still trying to be liked.