The Big Lies We Tell
And the Three I Don't Wanna Take to the Grave
“There’s always a little truth behind every ‘just kidding’. A little knowledge behind every ‘I don’t know.’ A little emotion behind every ‘I don’t care’. And a little pain behind every ‘it’s okay.” - Anonymous
When I was younger, if I told a lie, you could be sure that I was taking that lie with me to the grave. I mean, what was the point in lying in the first place if you were going to end up telling the truth? I’ll never forget when my dad caught me in my lies. He knew I would take it with me to my grave, but still somehow always gave me the opportunity to come clean.
I was a beauty-obsessed kid growing up (and still am to a degree). This often led to sneaking to put makeup on at school and washing it off before my dad picked me up, cutting my hair, and spending any money I got on makeup even if I couldn’t wear it. Beauty was my way of making myself feel confident in a school surrounded by girls who did everything in their power to make me feel small. One of the ways they loved to make me feel small was by commenting on my physical appearance: my hair, hairy arms, and/or eyebrows. I decided to take matters into my own hands one day - if I groomed my eyebrows, they wouldn’t have anything to say anymore.
I got away with my shaved brows until my aunts came into town one weekend. I was sitting at the island in our kitchen when one of my aunts asked, “Maileah, what did you do to your eyebrow?” I tried to play it off, lying and telling my mom I didn’t shave them. She came closer and stared at me. And began to yell at me, “asking me what I did do to my eyebrows. My dad said, “Maileah, you had to have done something.” We went upstairs, and my dad stopped and asked me, “If Jesus was standing right here, would your answer stay the same?” I burst into tears and told him the truth. I shaved my eyebrows with my mom’s electric face shaver because kids were picking on me. He held me as I cried and went to tell my mom. I walked into her bathroom, where she fixed my eyebrows and told me, “Don’t ever do this shit again, please.”
Shaving my eyebrows, cutting my hair, and cleaning my room weren’t the biggest lies I told as a kid. The biggest lies I told and continue to tell others (and myself) are “It’s okay.” and “I don’t care.” “and “It doesn’t matter.” They are the lies I’ve been committed to since childhood, rarely admitting the earth-shattering truth behind the lie until it was going to consume me whole.
After my latest depressive episode (Nov. 2022 - Jan. 2023), I grew tired of bearing the weight of these lies and have become hyper-fixated on not taking these lies to the grave with me anymore.
I’m a recovering perfectionist. Not in the traditional ways one would think - I don’t have OCD, and things don’t always have to be perfect for me. I’m the kind of perfectionist that can hide in plain sight. I always have the answers to everyone’s problems. I carry myself in a way that demonstrates consistent certainty, giving you the idea that I have it all together. I hide my messy feelings by providing intellectual conversation around insights, facts, and thought-provoking questions about you. “It’s okay,” “It doesn’t matter, and “I’m okay” are all lies that I’ve told throughout my life because I didn’t believe my real emotions mattered. I didn’t believe my truth mattered and that I deserved love even if my emotions were a messy inconvenience. I learned to process my emotions on the timeline of convenience, especially if they were messy. That’s the perfectionist I am.
I, alongside others, have nurtured the emotional perfectionist, particularly by learning and believing that there are good and bad emotions. The three big lies I’ve told my entire life were to mask the “bad” emotions and display what I thought others needed from me. I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone with the “bad.” I never wanted anyone to worry about me. I never wanted anyone to have to clean up my messes.
Truthfully, I’ve grown tired of these three lies. They’ve brought me years of unpacked trauma, repressed emotions, and shame. In November of last year, I had grown tired of displaying the “good” emotions. More specifically, strong, the superhero emotion. I had grown tired of hiding my messy feelings. I was tired of being the perfectionist, and I finally let my family and friends see that I was a messy human, struggling to make sense of so much that had been buried inside. I stopped saying that “I was okay” because I wasn’t. I stopped saying, “it’s okay,” but it wasn’t. I stopped saying, “it doesn’t matter” because it did.
This was my most challenging depressive episode because I had to wake up daily and acknowledge all my pain staring back at me in the mirror. I had no energy or fight to stuff it all back in. I didn’t have the energy to sort all the feelings into baskets. I didn’t know how to put words to everything I felt. I just knew it hurt. And as I rocked back in forth in my bed and on the floor crying, I just wanted all the “bad” emotions to stop and disappear. I wanted to return to being the emotional perfectionist I knew myself to be. But the more I fought, the more the “bad” emotions came out. The more I cried, the more I freaked out because I had no idea what was happening to me or my life.
There was one thing I knew for certain - I wouldn’t come out of this depressive episode the same. I could feel something changing inside me. I could see how others’ views and understandings of me were changing. I knew God was healing something inside of me.
*I’ll eventually write an entire newsletter dedicated to this depressive episode. It’s still too raw to write about, and I still feel like I’m learning from this episode.*
Looking back, the changes I felt and saw directly resulted from the three lies I stopped telling myself and others. When I was crying in the mirror, I tried telling myself I was okay, but when I did, I only cried harder. It wasn’t until I began telling myself, “I was going to be okay,” that I calmed down. I stopped telling myself and others that it was okay. Instead, I confronted how their actions made me feel and stood firm that it wasn’t okay. I stopped telling myself and everyone else that it didn’t matter because it all mattered. Everything that was happening and affecting me mattered, and I wasn’t okay.
Counseling has helped me realize the danger of compartmentalizing my emotions as good or bad. My emotions are not good or bad. They just are. They exist within me, but how I handle their existence can lead to good or bad. It’s created space to work through my default lie of “I’m okay.” Because I know at the start of every session, she will ask me how I am, forcing me to check in with myself before I log on. And even if I default to “I’m okay” accidentally, I recognize the default and either explain or backtrack. She’s helped me realize that the lie “it doesn’t matter” is an attempt to seem calmer and easy-going because many things matter to me, and I have many feelings about a lot because I’m an empath. The lie “it’s okay” stems from my fear of reinforcing my boundaries because I fear how people will respond.
I am actively healing the emotional perfectionist in me. I respect her because she’s created a survivor, a victor, and an empath (the quality I love most about myself). But she no longer serves me in this season of my life.
This season, I desire to show authentically, honoring my emotions, boundaries, and the person I want others to experience. I want to show up as the whole me, the multifaceted me. The dialectic me. That is who is going to the grave with me. The authentic me. Not the three lies I’ve always told.