It’s crazy how the power of convincing can be. You can convince others that you are on your a-game when you feel like everything is falling apart, you can trick your brain into liking a certain food and the craziest thing you can do is convince yourself that you’re okay.

You can talk to people and hear certain things and when you hear something or see something that hurts you, you feel your heart drop. But you tell yourself that you’re okay and that it doesn’t hurt you.

You fake a brave face and you start mentally preparing yourself to face the day. You work on guarding your heart and find a way to distract yourself from feeling hurt. With each day that passes, you get better at faking your smile, your laugh, your persona.

After a while, you get so good at faking it you believe that you actually are okay. You feel like you are on top of the world and that everything is finally going right for once in your life. You start getting closer to people and finding new things to love and dream about and everything is fine and dandy until you realize that it’s not. You find yourself slowly slipping away. You pull away from the people you consider close friends and you don’t know who to trust. You don’t want to talk to anyone about anything and nothing interests you anymore. You want to quit. You’re silently crying out for help but no one is listening.

Faking it is a temporary solution. It’s a way of running from your problems, and when you can’t run anymore, you get stuck. Your heart starts racing and you start sweating and getting dizzy and everything becomes so much that you start panicking and crying in the bathroom stall. It’s in that moment that you realize that you were never okay. And that is okay. Sometimes not feeling is better than feeling anything at all. I thought I was healing, but I just stopped feeling.