Dropping the mask and being true to yourself

We can’t keep up the pretense for ever — something has to give

Do your wear your emotional pain on the inside or on the outside?

Over the years, I have done both.

Let me explain.

In my early teens, I wore my pain on the inside. To the outside world, I was a slim, sporty, popular, high-achieving pupil.

Nobody had any idea how much I was hurting inside.

Nobody knew that I was restricting my food intake to change how I felt and to manage the emotional pain I had no idea how to process.

I’d pretend to have breakfast at home by splashing milk onto flakes of cereal. I’d eat a tiny lunch at school and at dinner time, I’d tell my mum I’d had a huge lunch and wasn’t hungry so that I could eat as little as possible.

Then, around 16, everything changed and I started to wear my pain on the outside. My under-eating flipped to over-eating and binge drinking. By 21, I was overweight.

I was still smiling on the outside, as you can see from the photograph below, but I hated how I looked.

Confident on the Outside

Fast forward to my thirties and I’d managed to lose the excess weight through a combination of extreme exercise, crash dieting and dodgy diet pills that made my heart race, acquired from private doctors in Mexico and Brazil, where I was living and working as a foreign correspondent.

By the time I arrived in London to work as a political journalist for Reuters, based in the Houses of Parliament, I was reasonably slim again.

Yet I was still in emotional pain, which I concealed well, behind a smile and an air of confidence, as you can see in the picture below.

I should say here that the smile wasn’t completely fake.

I enjoyed the cut and thrust of politics, the adrenaline rush of a big story, the thrill of walking through the corridors of power and the ego boost I got from rubbing shoulders with prime ministers and other VIPs.

Yet, the night before this photo, I may have cried myself to sleep after bingeing on bread and cereal until my stomach hurt or I may have fallen over in the bathroom after too much red wine.

Once again, nobody knew what happened behind closed doors.

I had a shiny outer shell, wore heavy duty armour and never left home without a mask.

But it’s impossible to hide such huge secrets forever — to pretend that all is well when, in truth, we’re falling apart.

You may know this from your own experience or from observing someone you love.

In the end, something has to give.

When the Mask Slipped

My mask slipped in my mid-30s and I had no choice but to dismantle the armour, piece by piece. This process was painful at times but I had to go through it if I wanted to move beyond survival and find a way to thrive.

I had to dismantle everything, in fact — the career, the status I’d relied upon to feel good enough, the patterns that had led me into unhealthy romantic relationships, the people-pleasing and self-neglect that had fuelled the binge eating habit I’d developed as a child to soothe myself.

I dismantled so much that for a while, it felt like there was nothing left — just me, my bed, my pyjamas and my tears.

Until I found the courage to rebuild, to start again, at a different pace, with a different career and different dreams — to create a life on my own terms.

Today, I no longer wear my pain on the outside or keep it hidden inside.

Instead, I meet it, head on.

I feel it. I process it. I share it. I do my best to heal it.

I also try, as much as possible, to live without a mask.

I try to be real, to tell the truth, to myself and others.

And I do my best to find purpose in my pain by sharing my journey with others, even if the process of doing so sometimes terrifies me, because my writing or my talks will never be good enough in my mind.

I had this experience recently when I delivered a TEDx talk on Finding Courage, Overcoming Fear and Breaking Free.

It was a big stage and a lot was riding on my performance, which is why my excruciatingly imperfect TEDx, in which I forgot some of my lines on stage (moments that were edited out of the final cut), triggered such a strong response in me.

I experienced a shame attack — an attack of not feeling good enough.

Yet, unlike 20 years earlier, I didn’t binge eat or binge drink or punish myself in other ways. Instead, I told myself I’d done my best in the circumstances, I forgave myself, I shared with others and I moved forwards.

This is the miracle of healing, the miracle of recovery.

Choosing Health Over Harm

But I’m only one step away from falling back into my old self-harming patterns.

Maybe you are too.

In my case, the binge eating has gone, thank goodness, but I can still neglect my self-care or force myself to over-work — driven by a deep unmet childhood need to be seen, to be heard, to feel important, to matter.

The difference is that now I see what I’m doing to myself and I’m able to pull back, to ease up, to pause and reflect.

I’m no longer in denial. I know when I’m acting out.

I know when I’m gripped by the legacy of developmental trauma (complex PTSD) and resort to my old coping mechanisms of fight, flight, freeze and fawn.

That awareness is game-changing, life-changing.

That awareness gives me a choice — to find healthy ways to manage my emotions rather than self-harming ones.

I can take a dip in the cold sea or walk through the woods with my dog or cycle with my husband (yes, I also found the courage to explore my wounds, transform my relationship patterns and create space to find healthy love).

I can share my pain with others rather than bury it inside or hide it behind a mask.

I can meet the childhood needs that went unmet.

I can be free from self-harm. I no longer have the need for a mask.

Avoiding Crash and Burn

What about you?

Are you carrying emotional pain and where do you wear it? On the inside or the outside?

And if you’re hiding it, what kind of pressure is that putting on you, your relationships and your career?

Remember, something has to give — eventually.

And it’s much better to take the mask off at our own pace, little by little, rather than crash headfirst into a brick wall and see it smash into smithereens.

Not only does that hurt a lot, but if we hit the wall, our recovery time is so much longer.

So what can you do today to allow your mask to slip?

What can you do today to feel your feelings?

What can you do today to be vulnerable with someone you trust?

What can you do today to thrive, not just survive?

Katherine Baldwin is a trauma-informed relationships coach and the author of How to Fall in Love. She is also a wellbeing and mental health speaker and TEDx speaker. Watch her TEDx on Finding Courage, Overcoming Fear and Breaking Free here. You can sign up to Katherine’s Love Letters here: www.katherinebaldwin.com