THE MASK OF PERFECTION

For decades,
I was hired to play the perfect wife.
The perfect mother.
The polished doctor.

I stood in front of cameras and said the right lines.
Wore the right clothes.
Smiled at the right moments.

I learned how to charm the room.
To make people believe I had it all figured out.

Perfectly.

What I didn’t know, was that perfection actually created distance.

When you show up polished and perfect, people measure themselves against you.
Your perfection becomes their inadequacy.

It's not intimacy.
It's a performance review.

When I began surrounding myself with truly loving people -
the kind who could see through polish to the bone -
that performance repelled.

Because real love doesn't want your highlight reel.
It wants your humanity.

The mask I thought was keeping me safe was keeping me isolated.
Every "right" thing I said created a gap between who I was and who they thought I was.

It wasn't until I let the mask crack -
until I stopped performing and started showing up as the gloriously imperfect woman I actually am -
that I found real friendship.
Real love.
Real home.

The people who love your perfection don't actually know you.
The ones who love your truth?
They're the ones who stay.

Perfection is a trauma response.

What we learned to survive environments where being human wasn't safe.
Where mistakes meant rejection.

But what kept you safe once will keep you alone now.

The woman underneath -
the one who laughs too loud,
who doesn't always have the answer,
who sometimes falls apart and needs to be held -

she’s the one people actually want to know.

She's the one capable of real intimacy.

What if the next version of you isn't more polished -
but more real?

What if your power isn't in the mask -
but in letting it fall?