It is said that all emotions stem from love or fear. This is a useful guide on how to hide your pain and/or fear. Why should you hide your pain? Because no one ever picks the fractured tea cup. It’s much nicer to drink in the other one. Besides, the fractured one might spill all over you.

Rule 1

Wash your face and brush your edges. Looks are everything.

Rule 2

Hide how you really feel. Especially from yourself. When even you don’t know how you feel, you won’t be able to break down unexpectedly.

Rule 3

Do not express yourself to anyone. Nobody needs to see you crack.

Rule 4

If you hide it well enough, you will eventually convince yourself as well. The hardest thing to master is self. Master your [external] self.

Rule 5

Understate what you’ve lost – chunks of your memories, the ability to ever be sound asleep and your faith in humanity.

Rule 6

Dodge the question, “How are you doing?”

Rule 7

Try to stop the memories from replaying.

No, You must never forget. What you don’t forget will never be able to hurt you again. (That’s a lie. Most times the sword wounds the same scar, over and over again.)

Rule 8

Stay up late. Watch something that has no logic.

Try not to close your eyes. Your dreams are a field of your emotions. Open, honest and ready to play. No low is too low.

Rule 9

When you accidentally fall asleep, hear the door creaking and remember the lightness in your heart when you stepped out the day before, before you realised that you had been in the company and at the mercy of those for whom your life is a liability to their own.

Once awake, do not think about the fragility of human life. Turn on the light. Wait for the morning.

Rule 10

Encourage those around you with positive messages. They need you to get yourself together so that they can move on with their lives.

Rule 11

Tell yourself that everything happens for a reason. Try not to think too hard about this statement. You might not believe it.

Rule 12

Wear a mask. Not the cloth one or medical one, the one with teeth.

Rule 13

Laugh sarcastically. Laugh at everything.

Rule 14

Taunt your husband all night with the demons that are haunting you. Tell him all the possible scenarios that are running through your head. That the devil came to visit and you were asleep. That you might never have heard the laughter of your child again. That in one hour in the night, someone had the power to destroy your entire life.

Rule 15

Shut down emotionally.

Other ways of hiding fear and/or pain

1. Drink.

Drink until the dark voice in your head stops talking. You might need to black out.

2. Eat.

Eat something you would not usually eat. Something fried, something creamy.

3. Talk.

Talk endlessly. Leave no space for silence between. Talk about anything and everything but do not talk about yourself. Talk about that girl whose husband is being unfaithful or the other one who is beautiful but her child is not, and the other one who aborted, and the one whose hair has refused to grow. Just keep talking until the noise is a din above your head intoxicating you.

4. Play a sport.

Choose tennis or any other sport that requires you to hit at something while shouting and grunting loudly.

5. Dance.

Dance like your life depends on it. Dance like Beyonce at the Superbowl. Dance until your moves no longer make sense.

6. Whatever you do, do not confront yourself. You never know what you will find. Do you have enough containers to keep it all in or you brave enough to let it all go with the wind?

You cannot see the light of God without seeing the darkness of the human heart. You cannot see the darkness of the human heart without seeing the light of God.

[This quote keeps running through my head.]