Now you are asking yourself, “do I fake what?”

Do you fake being happy so you don’t have to open up and talk about how you really feel inside? Do you feel like you are struggling with depression but you are too scared, too sad, too overcome with darkness you don’t want or don’t know how to talk about it?

If you said yes to any of those questions, pat yourself on the back because hooray you are normal!

As human beings, it’s not always easy to open up and let what we feel out.

“Why is that?” you ask?

It’s just the way it is.

The end.

Ha!

It’s totally normal for us to want to protect ourselves when we feel like we are getting hurt or going to get hurt or if we have been hurt in the past. Maybe we have feelings we don’t quite understand, they might be a little uncomfortable to confront.

It’s a natural human tendency and I think it definitely can be a good thing.

A good friend of mine had a quote on the side of her refrigerator for what seems to have been five years (before she took it off because she was moving), the quote said,

“That which you focus on grows”.

It spoke to me.

In other words, if you are always focusing on the good things in life most likely you will keep seeing more good things in life. If you seem to focus on the negative you will more than likely find yourself always feeling dissatisfied with life and its outcome.

This saying has so much truth to it. If we focus on becoming more Christ-like, more loving, more giving, more optimistic, chances are we will succeed eventually at what we desire.

If we are always telling ourselves we can’t do something or that we have it so bad, worse than others, chances are our circumstances won’t improve.

Fake it till you make it!

My mom was notorious for saying, “ fake it till you make it!” It has a great ring to it. If something is hard you fake it till it’s not, you basically pretend it’s ok and push through with a smile until eventually it really is ok. Because in the end y’all it’s going to ALL BE OKAY!

But what about those times when you can’t fake it anymore? That which you focus on doesn’t grow? If you focus on the good it seems to consistently lead your mind to pure distraught and sadness, instead of motivation and accomplishment.

What about the times when you feel like all of a sudden you have no control over your mental positive attitude you always felt you had a grasp on? What do you do then?

It happened to me

This exact thing happened to me many years back. The once self-motivated optimist became the self-loathing pessimist and realist. I once seemed to feel as if I could accomplish anything my heart set out to do, and then suddenly I could barely make myself get out of bed in the morning.

I felt like I had no choice to focus on the good because in my mind the good was only a fantasy I wasn’t allowed to dream about.

I had a depressive disorder and I didn’t like the way it felt. Finally, I talked to friends about it and some of them understood while others gave me (what they thought was) great advice such as, eat more vegetables and it will clear up your mindset. Exercise more and you will feel less depressed. Think more positively and you will be able to see the good more clearly.

While my friends and loved ones had good intentions none of their advice worked. Instead of helping me, it seemed to push me down even lower and lower because what they were telling me to do was so desirable but for me impossibly unreachable.

With a depressive disorder, you can feel like you have completely lost control over what you feel and what you think, therefore leading you to not be able to accomplish your deepest hearts desires. In fact, it can leave you not being able to accomplish much of anything at all.

After awhile of realizing no matter what you do to “try” to change your attitude or mindset and then realize you can’t, you have no better option then begin to fake it.

Maybe you are tired of people giving you their so-called “good advice”. Maybe you just want to feel normal and fit in like everyone around you seems to do easily.

Whatever the reason faking like you are just fine when you have depression (can be a coping mechanism) but if used for too long can bring bad results.

Let’s talk about it.

What if you had a normal scrape on your arm that turned into a skin infection. You decide not to clean it out and you just put a bandaid over it and go on about your daily business. At the end of the day you take the bandage off to go to sleep and you realize the infection has gotten even bigger. You don’t want to be bothered with calling or going to the doctor so you say to yourself “oh I’m fine, I will worry about it later”. The next morning you look down at your wound and realize the once small scrape has now turned into a deep puss-filled sore that has red streaking coming out from it. Not wanting to deal with it, you say to yourself “I will call the doctor about it tomorrow when I have time”.

We all know where this story leads. If we keep faking it, putting bandaids on it only. We could end up losing our whole arm, or it could result in a life-threatening infection.

What could we have done in the beginning to stop our little scrape from turning into a huge wound? The answers are obvious. Clean it, medicate it, watch it, get help with it if needed, etc.

The same goes for faking it when you have a mental illness such as depression. It is an illness you know? It’s not a bad attitude or a bad pessimistic outlook on life. Depression can be a disorder that if left untreated and ignored can eventually lead to a tragic ending.

So what do you do when you are so used to faking that you are ok inside but you really aren’t?

What do you do when the majority of your days are dark but you have all the logical reasons to be happy?

You get help! You open up! You stop faking it! Be real! Be transparent!

Just because you are opening up and showing the way you are truly feeling doesn’t make you less of a strong person. It actually makes you more of a strong person because you are allowing other people in and allowing yourself to get the help that you actually need.

If it seems too scary to open up to more than one person, start small. Start with maybe going to see your family doctor and telling Him/Her how you are feeling. Or start with a sister or a best friend that you know will not judge you for what you are feeling inside.

After you open up to one person you’ll see that it makes it a lot easier to open up to more people. You will find that actually you start to feel a little bit of relief from your symptoms of depression. People who also might struggle will find that they can relate to you and you can relate to them.

When we open up it also helps break the stigma that depression is something that we can just “get over” or that it is just an attitude that we need to change.

Opening up can help other people too!

Isn’t that what we all want to do? Don’t we all want to be helped and to be able to help other people at the same time?

So my invitation to you today is to open up to one person.

Try taking off the fake mask of “my life is perfect or I am just fine”, and try being a real-life normal human who has an illness that needs necessary attention to help cope or maybe even heal.

The bandaid you are hiding behind can make you feel protected for a while, but if you never take care of the problems underneath it can cause more damage than good.

Try it today! It might be hard in the beginning, but you can do hard things! The truth of the matter is you already are.

If you are not the one who is struggling with depression but you know someone who is, try holding back on your advice and just tell them that you love them and let them talk to you. Try to listen and try to understand that what they’re going through you don’t quite get and that’s OK. You can still be there for them to love them. And just because they have depression doesn’t mean that they can’t be there for you too. Some amazing advice on how to help support others who are struggling is here too.

It’s hard for me too. It’s not easy opening up like this to the world and letting them in to see the hard vulnerable parts of my life. But in doing so I have felt so much more light than if I wouldn’t have. I also have been able to help others who feel the exact same way I do, and that right there makes it all worth it!

😘