life will knock me down.

I can take it off. 

The mask, the act, whatever.  I can take it off.  I can stop doing it.  It is not who I am because I can be someone else and it doesn’t. fucking. hurt.

Leaving the smile behind is liberating.  Allowing myself to feel, to actually feel something, even if it was black despair and desperationg, it was something.  There is still something there.

That, in itself, is a comfort.

But of course, such behavior is unacceptable.  Because I need to be happy because They won’t be unless I am.  I am sick of being a martyr.  I am sick of being someone I’m not just so They can feel okay about everything.  I am not okay.  I am not fine.  And I am sick of the mask, the act, whatever, that has been stifling me for more than half my life.  Because now I know, for certain, that I am someone else underneath.  There is something that has not yet been taken from me, and I am sick of Them trying to remedy that.  Let me have my despair, my angst, my whiny, petulant self-indulgence.  Let me keep something.

Or not.