faking-normal

This was a new skill she'd acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.

Like a lot of people with mental illness, I spend a lot of time fronting. It__ really important to me to not appear crazy, to fit in, to seem normal, to do the things __ormal people_ do, to blend in. As a defense mechanism, fronting makes a lot of sense, and you hone that mechanism after years of being crazy. Fronting is what allows you to hold down a job and maintain relationships with people, it__ the thing that sometimes keeps you from falling apart. It__ the thing that allows you to have a burst of tears in the shower or behind the front seat of your car and then coolly collect yourself and stroll into a social engagement_We are rewarded for hiding ourselves. We become the poster children for __roductive_ mentally ill people, because we are so organized and together. The fact that we can function, at great cost to ourselves, is used to beat up the people who cannot function.Because unlike the people who cannot front, or who fronted too hard and fell off the cliff, we are able to __eep it together,_ whatever it takes.