Everyone Wears Makeup

Everyone wears makeup. Not just blush and eyeliner but masks we paint in silence, to hide the storms inside us. We wear it when we’re trying to come clean from telling a lie that lived too long in our lungs. We wear it when we're passed up for promotion smiling wide, while swallowing the burn of being overlooked. We wear it on the first day of school, trying to dress like courage, trying not to smell like fear. We wear it when we teach our kids right from wrong while quietly battling wrongs that were never made right in us. We wear it when love turns to leaving, in marriage and in divorce, learning to be whole with half a heart. We wear it when we’re broke not just financially, but broken in soul from the weight of poverty, where every smile is budgeted. We wear it through trauma the kind no one sees but we feel every morning when we force ourselves to get up. We wear it when we were touched too early, hurt too often, or silenced too long. We wear it when we’re trapped in places we never chose stuck in cycles we never started suffocating in silence, yet expected to smile. We wear it when the loneliness gets too loud, and there's no one on the other end of the phone, no one who really sees past the "I'm fine" painted on our face. We wear it as the years creep up when the mirror shows lines but hides the battles we've won, and no one talks about how heavy growing older can feel. We wear it when someone we love is taken from this world and we show up to the funeral with a powdered face and shattered heart, We wear it in grief, when the casseroles stop coming and the house is quiet again, but the ache still screams. We wear it when we feel not enough not pretty enough, not smart enough, not strong enough. When we compare our cracked mirror to someone else's filtered light and convince ourselves we're less than. We wear it when our self-worth has been chipped away by cruel words, by neglect, by all the times we were told we didn’t measure up. We wear it when we’re bi, gay, or trans and the world calls it “a phase,” or says we’re broken. So we hide, we lie, we shrink ourselves to fit what never fit us. We wear it when coming out feels like a second birth equal parts pain and freedom wondering who will love us when we show our whole truth. Wondering if we’ll survive being seen. We wear it when addiction calls us by name, when pain feels too big and numb feels like relief. self-medicate with secrets, with pills, bottles, needles, food anything to blur the edges of what we’re carrying. We wear it when we swear today will be different, when we shake in silence, when we fall again and again but still crawl toward sober. when shame tells us we’ll never make it, but something small inside whispers try again. We wear it when life feels so heavy, that even breathing feels like pretending. We wear it When some days the thought creeps in that maybe leaving would hurt less than wearing one more mask. We wear it When we feel our kids deserve someone better someone stronger, less broken. But even in that darkness, you put on one more coat because some part of you still hopes tomorrow will be softer. We wear it not for vanity, but for survival. Everyone wears makeup. It’s not always on our face. Sometimes it’s in our tone, our handshake, our held breath. We all paint something on, because bare skin truth can be too tender for the world to handle. And sometimes, just sometimes we take it off in the dark, alone, where no one can see but God and the ghosts we carry.