Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
Perfect Lies – Honest Eyes –
The Masks We Wear and the Eyes That Still See Us
🎭 “Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.” — Robert Brault
There’s an art to wearing a mask. We start young, practicing in small ways — the “I’m fine” mask, the “everything’s under control” mask, the “happy for you” mask that barely hides the envy underneath. By adulthood, most of us have built an entire wardrobe of them.
And boy, do we wear them well. We polish our smiles, adjust our tone, rehearse our small talk until even the mirror believes us. We post filtered moments, curate opinions, and learn to hide our cracks under layers of performance. It’s not even deception anymore — it’s a kind of social survival.
But here’s the cruel joke: once the disguise is perfect, you stop knowing who’s really looking back at you. And that’s when you start longing — desperately — for someone who can see through it all. Someone who notices the flicker behind your eyes when you say, “It’s fine.” Someone who can read the room and your silence.
Because what we really crave isn’t admiration. It’s recognition. We want to be known — and still accepted.
Yet the more flawless the mask, the harder that becomes. The same armor that protects us also isolates us. You can’t be loved for who you are if no one ever meets that person.
And so, like some grand masquerade ball that never ends, we dance in circles — spinning in conversation, clinking glasses, laughing on cue — all the while hoping that somewhere in the crowd, someone’s eyes will catch ours and say, “I see you, even without the mask.”
The funny part? That kind of person doesn’t appear until you start letting the disguise slip. Vulnerability may feel like weakness, but it’s the only honest currency left in a world where everyone’s acting rich in confidence and poor in truth.
So maybe the real elegance isn’t in the mask — it’s in the courage to take it off, even if only for a moment.
And when you do, you’ll find that the people who matter don’t flinch at your scars. They’ve got their own.
