Not Living a Lie Anymore

I wrote Dark Echoes with one statement in mind:
I am not living a lie no more.
Like ink poured from a bottle, I poured my heart onto every page. I wrote from a place I had spent most of my life trying to hide. Tearing off the mask I had spent years building was not something that happened overnight. It was a process. A long, painful, necessary process. And I know I wasn’t the only one hurting. I hurt my ex-wife too. Unfortunately, she was a casualty of my mental war. Thankfully, my children adjusted very well.
I started building that mask when I was nine or ten years old. Even then, I understood that there were parts of me the world might not accept. So, I covered them. I buried them. I learned how to perform a version of myself that made other people more comfortable.
But that performance was exhausting.
The mental anguish was relentless, constantly bearing down on me, weighing me down like stone in water. I was bound to a dance I had never been choreographed for. Every step felt unnatural, but I kept moving anyway. I kept smiling. I kept pretending. I kept becoming someone I was never meant to be.
Over time, that mask grew up with me. It became stronger. Heavier. More powerful. Eventually, it took on a life of its own.
I became so good at wearing it that I no longer had to think about it. The mask stayed on no matter how much rot and decay lived underneath. It shielded me from the hurt I feared would come from people I thought loved me. It protected me from words I did not think I could survive. It stood between me and the judgmental, critical eyes that stared, glared, and tried to penetrate my facade.
And what a heavy facade it was.
Heavy to carry.
Heavy to maintain.
Heavy to survive.
That mask hardened me. It forged parts of my soul into something bitter and sour. It turned my heart into a wall of rock and stone. What should have been a chrysalis of becoming was instead a tomb. There was no beautiful butterfly growing inside.
There was a corpse dying.
And eventually, the mask itself began to stink. It carried the odor of everything false. Every word, every act, every moment built on lies. Not just lies spoken out loud, but lies lived through fear, shame, and the belief that I had to become something I was not in order to be loved.
Removing that mask meant removing the life of deceit I had built around myself. It meant facing the truth about the childhood and teenage years that had been stolen from me. Stolen because I believed I had to be someone else.
Someone “normal.”
Someone “righteous.”
Someone acceptable.
Someone I was never any good at being.
I did it for the sake of pleasing self-righteous people. I did it for the sake of begged prayers and lost words that fell to the ground. I did it because I thought goodness meant erasing myself.
But as Andy Grammer sings, I’m not good at being you.
And I wasn’t.
I tried desperately to become what others thought I needed to be. From the age of nine, I cried a billion hot tears trying to build myself into a shell of fake goodness that was only skin deep. But the heart of who I was did not match the person I was acting out in front of others.
I was empty.
Lonely.
Dead.
Always afraid someone would see the real me. Always terrified that my true self would slip out in my walk, my talk, my interests, my preferences, or the way I loved.
I was blinded by fear and convinced that if I let the real me bleed through, I would condemn my soul to an eternity of damnation.
I believed that if I loved in the way that was most natural to me, I would be refused peace. Refused comfort. Refused love. I was told, directly and indirectly, that my love would be fake. That it could never produce life.
But life is not only created in a womb.
Life is also created within the soul.
And mine was starving.
I was left with nothing real. Nothing fulfilling. Nothing satisfying. Always thirsty. Always hungry. Always in pain. Always alone, even in a room full of people. Always feeling like I was watching life happen from behind glass.
There is a line in Love, Simon that says, “I’m done living in a world where I don’t get to be who I am.”
That line speaks to the plea of the little boy I used to be. A little boy raised to become the walking dead among people who were certain they knew what was right, even while they could barely keep their own lives from falling apart.
Dark Echoes came from that place.
It came from the hidden room.
The locked chest.
The buried grief.
The child who learned to survive by disappearing.
But I am not disappearing anymore.
I am not hiding behind the mask.
I am not performing someone else’s version of goodness.
I am not living a lie anymore.