The biggest lie I’ve been holding onto in my life for a very long time is my smile. I smile because it’s easier than explaining. I say, “I’m fine,” because it’s easier than saying what I’m going through.
Yeah, you might disagree with me. There are people, like my friends, who stand beside me and help me walk through hell. But to be honest, there is no one in this world who understands me completely except myself. What am I going through? How much am I suffering? The things I’m slowly losing? None of them truly know. None of them can feel what I carry every single day.
When people ask us, “How are you doing?” do we really give an honest answer every time? We put on a smile and tell them, “Yep, we’re doing great.” It’s easier than showing them that we aren’t doing great.
We listen to everyone else’s problems. We encourage them. We comfort them. We celebrate their victories. We become the shoulder others lean on, yet when it’s our turn, we often have no one to lean on.
I forgot how to cry when I’m supposed to. Instead, I smile now. That hurts even more.
When I’m sad, I laugh. When life puts me in a difficult situation, I laugh. Even when I’m giving everything I have and everything around me is falling apart, I still laugh. People have told me that I’m crazy, and the man I respected the most once told me that I didn’t take the situation seriously. But the truth was, I was trying my best.
Sometimes we put on a smile because we don’t want others to feel uncomfortable around us. We don’t want our pain to become someone else’s burden. We laugh at comedy shows. We admire people who make us smile. Yet behind every smile is a story we know nothing about. Everyone is carrying something of their own, yet somehow they still find a way to make us laugh, make us smile, and sometimes even bring us to tears.
Leaning on the person we wanted to stay, crying our hearts out, telling them what we’re going through.
“What the hell am I doing? Where did I make the mistake?”
Putting those feelings into words, fumbling over them, with tears running down our cheeks as we try to explain our situation.
Ahh… even imagining someone listening without judging feels comforting.
But what if that person doesn’t think much of it? What if they simply brush it aside? That hurts even more than whatever the hell we’re already going through.
There was a time…
We laughed without pretending.
We smiled without hurting ourselves.
We trusted without overthinking.
We cried without feeling ashamed of our tears.
It’s still us. The same name, the same face… but somehow, not the same person anymore.
I learned to stay strong because I got tired of watching people come and go, walking through my life as if it were just another stop in theirs. Every goodbye took a piece of me with it, and every broken promise taught me to rely on myself a little more. Yeah, maybe I was wrong to place all my trust in the people I believed in the most. I expected them to stay, to understand, to care the way I cared. Instead, they became another lesson I never wanted to learn.
Since then, I’ve learned to carry my pain quietly, because opening up no longer feels as easy as it once did.
I learned that not every smile carries happiness. Over time, I found myself wearing different versions of it — one to hide my pain, one to reassure others, and one to convince myself that I’d be okay.
Maybe that’s the cruelest part of all. After wearing those smiles for so long, I no longer remember what my real one looked like.
