Pretenders

Aren’t we good pretenders? It isn’t always obvious to see what others may be going through. We Can’t always tell who's going through a divorce, who lost a child, or who suffered some horrendous atrocity. We are too afraid of letting others see our scars. We smile even when we want to cry, we laugh when we want to scream and we post happy pics on social media even though we are ugly crying on the couch. Oh the masks we wear to try to appear like all is well because maybe if everyone thinks we are happy we could believe that instead of the crippling reality that the world is crushing us with the weight of the disaster we are currently in and that we are suffocating and drowning and clawing our way toward someone or something to just take the edge off, toward our salvation. Some of us find ourselves a prisoner of addiction dancing around with our poison and tiptoeing over our demons trying to find a way through to the next minute, hour or day without losing the only piece of sanity that holds the balance because any misstep would tip the scale and the ground would open up and swallow us into a deeper hell than we are already in and yet…. We keep on pretending. Pretending like it isn’t our 3rd bottle of wine and that we have our shit together or that when someone says we look tired that it isn’t because we were up all night fighting with our spouse and that we are actually at our wits end with the blows life keeps throwing our way. We pretend to the next pretender who is just pretending to us