Never Let Them See You Cry

Growing up, I would always say:

Fake it till you make it. Never let them see you cry.

I carried that mentality with me for years.

Through heartbreak. Through loneliness. Through moments when I felt completely misunderstood. Again and again, I moved through life believing I had to hold myself together because there was nobody around whom I felt safe enough to fall apart.

I learned how to smile while hurting.

How to perform confidence while questioning everything.

How to make survival look beautiful.

And underneath all of it was a person desperately wanting somewhere safe enough to stop pretending.

Now, I look around my life and feel enormous gratitude for the reflections of love that have shown me something different.

There are people who remind me what a gift it is to be around someone with whom you do not have to fake anything.

People around whom I can take up space.

People who allow me to bring the parts of myself I fear will be the messiest into the room and do not immediately retreat.

There have been moments when I have watched what I can only describe as the grace of God move through another human being... the hand that reaches toward mine when I am worried, the person who remains when I become uncertain, the presence that says without words:

You don't have to perform here.

For so many nights, I stayed awake asking myself why I wasn't lovable.

Why couldn't men see me for who I was and love me the way their eyes sometimes seemed to say they wanted to?

What was missing?

What was wrong with me?

Again and again, those questions eventually led me toward the same conclusion:

I needed a man to validate my experience.

I needed him to choose me so I could finally believe there was something worth choosing.

But something has changed.

I am that man now.

I am the man validating this experience.

I am the one capable of looking back at everything I have lived through and saying:

Yes, that hurt.

Yes, you loved deeply.

Yes, you were afraid.

Yes, you survived it.

And yes... it is difficult to open yourself to love.

Sometimes when you open yourself, you will not receive love in return.

Sometimes you will receive something more painful than the uncertainty you were trying to escape.

Rejection.

Silence.

Abandonment.

Truth.

But even truth can contain mercy.

Because eventually wondering becomes knowing.

And there is an incredible relief in knowing.

To finally see the reality behind the fantasy.

To look beyond the veil of security and witness the beating heart underneath.

To know that something is alive and fragile and temporary, and therefore to honor each interaction with patience and reverence.

That, to me, is part of why I am alive.

To explore the limits of what I believe is possible.

To live somewhere near the growing edge.

Sometimes I am the reflection standing at the edge encouraging someone else to jump.

Sometimes I am the person sitting at rock bottom waiting beside them after their tower has fallen.

Both are sacred positions.

I am learning that there is no mess so large that love cannot sit beside it.

There is no darkness I need to pretend does not exist in order to remain worthy of belonging.

There is no demon I need to become in order to face the ones that once frightened me.

I am that I am.

And I will continue becoming.

Because somewhere along the way, a voice that had been told to disappear decided instead to speak.

A person who once wondered whether life was worth continuing decided to live.

And now that voice has something to say.

Soft skin does not mean a weak spirit.

Look how far you can travel through dangerous worlds while remaining soft.

Look how many times tenderness can survive impact.

A diamond is strengthened by pressure, but perhaps the deeper miracle is not that pressure made it valuable.

The diamond was valuable before the pressure.

The trials simply revealed what could not be destroyed.

There were times life tried to convince me that I was not beautiful.

Not worthy.

Not lovable.

Not masculine enough.

Too feminine.

Too emotional.

Too sexual.

Too strange.

Too much.

And still...

here I am.

Resilient enough to choose freedom over captivity.

Soft enough to remain moved by beauty.

Reverent enough to recognize those moments of impact that stop us in our tracks and take our breath away.

Royalty returns.

Not because it was never wounded.

But because being wounded never removed the crown.

I return now ready to claim another moment.

Another timeline.

Another story.

If you spent your entire life pretending you weren't broken and somehow made your way into healing:

Good job.

I mean that.

And if you were the person who always seemed to have everything together and suddenly your entire life is falling apart:

We are here for you too.

Because some of us know exactly what it feels like when everything collapses.

We know what it feels like when the identity you depended upon stops working.

When relationships change.

When certainty disappears.

When the person in the mirror becomes unfamiliar.

When the tower falls.

And we know something else.

You can survive the falling.

For the person living in fear...

For the person afraid of what they might discover about themselves...

For the person hiding an identity, desire, grief, dream, truth, or tenderness because they believe revealing it could cost them love...

I want you to know:

It is okay to be alive.

It is okay to accept yourself.

It is okay to still be figuring yourself out.

Maybe isolation forced you to finally meet yourself.

And now that you have...

stand.

Stand like those who stood before you.

Stand beside the people who once swallowed their tears because crying did not feel safe.

Stand beside the people who smiled in the faces of things that terrified them.

Stand beside those who were wounded and still refused to become cruelty.

Have respect for those who have fought through fear.

Because when you really look at them, you may recognize pieces of yourself.

Our stories are different.

But the human underneath them is remarkably familiar.

We know loneliness.

We know shame.

We know heartbreak.

We know the desperate desire to be chosen.

And many of us are learning that healing begins when we stop waiting for somebody else to declare us worthy.

So now...

we are here to stand with you.

To sit beside you.

To hear you out.

To make room for the version of you that you are convinced nobody could possibly love.

Bring the messy part.

Bring the frightened part.

Bring the angry part.

Bring the feminine part.

The masculine part.

The confused part.

The grieving part.

Bring the person you became to survive and the person underneath them who is finally ready to live.

You do not have to fake it here.

You do not have to make it before you are worthy of being witnessed.

And you do not have to hide your tears.

We are here because some of us have done that too.

We know how difficult the road can become.

And now we get to become something we desperately needed when we were walking it alone:

the witness that it gets better.

The Beautiful Story Never Told, Jo He and Mai Taeo

"There’s no way to go back and undo what we have done. No way to clear the fights or the let downs. No time to edit a message or say something different. No ability to change the bed we made and then burned. Yet, we can forgive. We can make space for a new conversation. We can take time to shift our perspectives."