It was a Sunday afternoon when the photo came through in our family group chat. It was a shot from the week before, with perfect lighting and everyone smiling. It was also the kind of image that gets saved and looked at later. Our mom beat cancer, and we of course looked happy…because we were, in fact, happy…which honestly underplays the relief and joy of the day.
And for a moment, looking at it felt strange. Because just before that photo was taken, there had been an argument…a series of arguments really, a long drive sitting in silence, and a few deep breaths in the parking lot before walking in and becoming, for the camera and everyone else, the version that holds it together. I would be filing for divorce 2 days later and packing my bag to leave the country 4 weeks after.
But in the photo was a different version, frozen, permanent and completely convincing. It was hard to know whether to feel proud of it or hollowed out by it and what my life had become.
We all have a version of that photo. Sometimes it’s literal, like a picture from a vacation you thoroughly, a well decorated holiday table you were proud of, or a candid that someone tagged you in where you look relaxed, present and like someone who has figured things out.
At other times it’s not a photo at all. It’s simply the picture other people carry of you in their heads, assembled from every time you showed up, held it together, and made the difficulty look invisible.
There is this version of you that the world sees: Capable and Composed. You are the one who handles all the things, answers the phone, shows up for work, keeps everything moving, and somehow makes it all look manageable. And that version is not a lie…well not exactly. It is real. But it’s also curated, whether you meant to curate it or not.
And then there is the version only you know. The one where you’re:
Running on empty for longer than you can remember, and not sure when you stopped noticing.
Saying yes when you mean no, and paying for it later in resentment that you can’t quite pinpoint.
Surrounded by people and yet still unable to find yourself in any of them.
Sitting in the car a little too long before going inside, just to have one more minute that belongs to you.
Wondering how your life started looking so good on the outside while feeling so far from you on the inside.
That space between what people see and what you are actually living is the gap. And it’s where the source of our exhaustion lives. Exhaustion that comes from performing okayness for so long that you’ve started to lose track of what okay actually feels like.
Spoiler alert: It’s not this.
The Image Is Not Always A Lie
Before we go any further, know this…you probably did build what people see. In fact, I’m sure of it. The career you fought hard to have, the stability you’re famously known for, the reputation for being someone others can rely on, and years of showing up when it was hard while making it look easy when it wasn’t. That is not a lie. It was real work, and it was your work.
This image came from choices you made, often at real cost to yourself. You built reliability because you valued it, competence because you worked at it and became the person people call because you answered, consistently, when others did not. And there is something to honor in that, not just something to question.
But, as with life, here’s where it gets complicated. This image only shows the part of you that performs well. It leaves out the part of you that is asking for care, and the part that is tired, uncertain, or grieving something you can’t name.
Here’s the thing, when an image goes unchallenged long enough, it starts to function like a contract. People expect you to keep being that version. You expect it of yourself. And the distance between who you actually are and who you have agreed to be grows wider over time.
There’s also something worth naming about the way we participate in this. We’e not passive victims of the images others have built of us. We tend to them. We post the good photo and leave the hard day out of the caption. We say we’re fine because fine is easier than the actual answer.
We perform competence even when we feel lost, because being seen as lost feels worse than actually being lost.
The image is partly a protection, and protections aren’t always bad. But they do have a cost, and it’s worth knowing what you are paying.
There’s an invisible weight from keeping the image alive because it feels safer than having a conversation we don’t know how to start, or admitting something we’re not sure we’re ready to face.
Eventually the image becomes its own kind of structure. Load-bearing, with the responsibility of everything depending on this stability and strength. And now you’re not sure what falls if you touch it.
…and that sucks. Full stop.
The Reality is Usually Hidden in Plain Sight
You see, nobody claps for reality. It doesn’t always make for a good photo, a clean story, or an easy thing to bring up over dinner. Reality tends to be the stuff that happens in between the parts of your life that are easy to talk about.
It’s the 2 a.m. worry spiral that visits more nights than you would like to admit. The relationship that looks fine from the outside but feels like two people who stopped finding each other, and neither of you have had the courage to say it out loud yet.
It’s the body you have been meaning to make peace with for years, still waiting. The debt behind the apartment that photographs well. The job that looks like success but feels like it’s slowly draining the life out of you. And the calendar so full of things you once agreed to that there’s no longer any room for life you actually want.
Reality is also the emotional weight that doesn’t show up anywhere on paper. Instead it’s a private disappointment you carry around like a bag you forgot you were even holding.
It shows up as grief over a version of your life you thought you would have by now or the resentment that surfaces in your tone before you even realize it is there, and the guilt that follows it, because you know you have a lot and you can’t explain to yourself anyone else why it still doesn’t feel like enough.
None of this makes you ungrateful by the way, it just makes you are human, and humans are not built to perform indefinitely without somewhere to put the weight down.
The gap between what your life looks like and what it feels like is information, nothing else. It’s not a character flaw or some deep internal moral miscalculation. It’s your subconscious trying to get your attention through whatever signal it has left after years of being filtered out.
The question isn’t whether you will eventually have to listen, there’s no way around that.
The question is whether you’ll wait until the signal gets loud enough to be a crisis, or if you’ll choose to turn toward it now, while it is still quiet.
The Reset Begins When You Stop Protecting the Image
This reset doesn’t require an announcement or blowing up the things you spent years building. It’s unlikely that those who feel the gap are looking for destruction. What you’re looking for is permission. You want permission to stop pretending, at least to yourself, that everything is fine when it’s not.
And more importantly, you want permission to tell the truth about where you actually are, without the edit, without the spin, and without the version of it that’s easier for everyone else to hear.
Unfortunately, that permission isn’t something me and anyone else can give you. It has to come from within, and it usually starts very small: a thought you let yourself finish, a feeling you sit with instead of immediately jumping into action, a moment of honesty in the car or the shower or the space between sleeping and waking, when the curated version goes silent and something more real finally gets a word in.
Think about the energy that goes into protecting the image and the careful management of how you come across. The anticipation of what people need to see from you and making sure they see it, while editing of your own experience in real time so that it fits the story is…exhausting.
I mean all of that has to come from somewhere, and it usually comes from the same reserve that was supposed to go toward actually living your life.
Protecting the image is expensive. And most of us don’t realize how expensive until we try, even briefly, to stop.
There is also something worth sitting with about what you’re actually afraid will happen if you close the gap.
Is it the loss of other people’s regard for you? I mean if you’re not the one they can count on, then who are you to them?
Or is it something more internal like if you stop moving, you’ll have to acknowledge everything you’ve been moving away from, like the life you claim you want to live.
Both fears are understandable. Really. Your girl gets it, I do. But both fears are also keeping you stuck in a version of your life that is costing you more than you know.
The reset begins when you stop asking how to keep looking okay and start asking what it would actually take to be okay. Those are two very different questions with very different answers.
The first keeps you in maintenance mode indefinitely, managing appearances, managing energy, managing what gets through and what does not. The second requires honesty. It asks you to look at your actual life and decide what it needs, not what it looks like it has.
That honesty doesn’t have to be a big conversation and it does not have to happen with anyone else in the room. It can start as one you have with yourself, in the car before you go inside. Just one honest answer to one real question.
That’s usually enough to begin.
Your Radical Reset This Week
For 24 hours, tell the truth…about everything. The real unfiltered, unfettered truth. No lies. No grandstanding. No pretending or performing.
Just the simple truth.
I dare you.
Closing
Closing the gap is not a moment. It’s a practice. It is choosing honesty over image, again and again, in small ways that nobody else will ever see or applaud. It is unglamorous and slow and sometimes lonely.
And it is the most important work you will ever do, because everything else you build from here will only be as real as the foundation you are willing to tell the truth about.
No so, you don’t need to destroy what you’ve built. You just need to stop lying to yourself to maintain it.
I released a Youtube video last week about grieving the life you don’t actually have…it’s in the acknowledgement that we’re able to live fully in the one we do. You can watch it here.
See you next week.
— Donteacia 💛
