How Pretending Became Survival, And Truth Became Freedom

Life is full of limitations. Freedom is internal. It lives in the quiet courage to stop pretending and to let your real face be seen. 

Growing up, my life looked perfect from the outside. I had everything a child could ask for. I lived in a pastoral village, had many friends, and moved through the world as the girl boys wanted to be with and girls wanted to be like. I was always picked first—for teams, activities, shows—the one voted “closest to perfect”. It was an image that was hard to maintain, considering the reality I was living with. But I didn’t have a choice. I thought it was the only way I could survive. 

What was happening in my life couldn’t be acknowledged without disrupting everything, so I learned to carry it quietly. I was spoken over. Unheard. Silence began to feel like strength. I believed it was protecting the image I was required to uphold—and protecting my family from having to face what was actually happening. Over time, pretending stopped feeling like a choice, and became a skill—one I got very good at.

So I spent my childhood feeling like an imposter. They called me lucky; I felt undeserving. They said I was pretty; I became more insecure. They envied my popularity; I felt like a fraud. I was everywhere—and nowhere at the same time.

In my early twenties I left home on a long quest of discovery. What began as defiance turned into motion. I spent five years travelling, absorbing the world, hoping it would show me who I was and where I belonged. I expanded the image of the unstoppable, fearless girl and lived it fully. My life looked free. I believed I was free. But the more adventures I collected, the deeper my internal emptiness grew—until I could no longer outrun it. All that remained was the image I carried. My quest fed my story, but not my soul. 

In my early twenties I was living in Japan. I fell in love with the culture’s deep respect for nature, art, and one another. It was a great catalyst to who I was becoming. But beneath the surface, things had started falling apart. My visa was running out, my relationship was reaching an end, the life that I built so far away from home had no ground beneath it. There was nothing left to hold onto , and no energy left to make it happen. The door was closing. I was living a life far from how I grew up, yet close to who I truly am, and still—I felt profoundly disconnected from my own heart.

If I wanted to live with integrity, I had to stop performing and begin the harder work of knowing myself. Courage was no longer about movement or escape, but about staying—inside myself. I had to stop outrunning the pain and turn toward it instead. Going home was the beginning of healing.

The first step was to speak. I was convinced that if I did, the image I had protected for so long would collapse—that I would be exposed as a fraud, that something irreparable would break. It didn’t. The masks fell away, and with them, a weight I had been carrying for years. For the first time in my life, I experienced a freedom that had nothing to do with where I was or what I was doing.

Over time, I understood that healing was never about erasing my story, but that my story was the foundation of my life’s work. What once defined me began to orient me instead. My story stopped being a mask and became a cornerstone instead—a chapter in my soul’s evolution. As I allowed myself to express more of who I am, my relationship with myself expanded. Authentic freedom followed.

In my life, authenticity began as a matter of survival, but it couldn’t remain there. I learned that the truth has so many ways of being communicated, and the impact of its expression can do as much harm as silence. Speaking honestly required discernment: knowing when to speak, how to speak, and when to wait. Truth needs time to be metabolized, until it is connected to our heart and not to our story. Communication, when it is precise, becomes a potent healing art.

Protecting an image taught me how easily performance can replace truth. Letting it go taught me something harder: that freedom requires responsibility—to speak honestly, to speak carefully, and to live in alignment with what is real.

Life is full of limitations. Freedom is internal. It lives in the quiet courage to stop pretending—and to let your real face be seen.