From pretending to ‘tending’

Coming out as gay, getting divorced, and moving back to Scotland after six years in the Midlands created a kind of ground zero in my life.

Everything was up for reinterpretation. Life was a blank slate. My identity felt newly exposed; ripe for self-expression, but also for judgement.

Paradoxically, even though I had reclaimed an essential part of myself, the question of identity became more urgent than ever. Who am I? It stopped being a midnight thought and became a project. A race. And beneath it all was a fear that everything before had been a lie.

If you pretend for long enough, confusion is inevitable, because when you pretend to be straight for 35 years, eventually, you start to believe it.

I lived with a man. I had sex with a man. I was married to a man. Seventeen years of waking up beside the same person, wearing a wedding band on my left hand…. it felt convincing.

So when I woke up alone, with a deep incision where the ring had become embedded, I worried I’d never trust my judgement again.

For a long time, I blamed myself. But I’ve come to believe that self-judgement is misplaced and that pretending, as painful as it may be, is often a form of survival. We learn early how to perform what keeps us safe, accepted, loved.

And so I now divide my life into two parts: before I came out, and after.

the price of pretending

I’d love to say that once I came out, all pretences dropped. That I stopped performing altogether. But pretending is woven into modern life, although certainly, there’s a difference between smiling in a meeting and building an entire life around a foundational, identity-based lie.

And the consequences of the latter don’t arrive all at once – they accumulate, like death by a thousand paper cuts.

For me, they showed up in the body. A year of unexplained chronic pain left me unable to work, climb stairs, or hold a proper conversation. Bed became my prison. Test after test came back inconclusive and no physical issue was named as the root.

While some research suggests that self-concealment is associated with higher levels of pain, I can’t prove direct causation, but I have spent time wondering how much it costs the body to hold onto something so important, for decades.

Emotionally, the cost can be a persistent sadness without a clear origin. I’ve been depressed since my early twenties, and I always struggled with not having a singular event to blame. But sometimes it isn’t one event. It’s the daily, almost invisible acts of self-denial that chip away at your capacity for joy.

You don’t tell the truth, so you don’t pursue what you love. Instead, you gravitate onto a path that keeps you safe, and call it free will.

The deepest consequence of pretending is disconnection from yourself, and when that disconnection becomes clear, self-blame isn’t far behind. Why didn’t you realise? Why didn’t you figure it out sooner? Look at the devastation you’ve caused! (that’s my internal monologue, at least…)

But pretending isn’t stupidity or weakness. Often, it’s an instinctual, intelligent (even when unconscious) response to environments where honesty feels too dangerous to embody.

rethinking what happens after pretending

I’ve started to think of pretending as “pre-tending.”

The before stage.

Those decades of ‘performance’ weren’t meaningless or wasted years. They are helpful data and can now be used as a reference point, evidencing what doesn’t fit and how I want to move forward.

It’s not always easy to look back on those years. I’ve avoided it, and can only do it when I’m feeling brave and resilient. But when I’m able to, I find a map of self-abandonment that acts as a lesson learned, because pretending, at its core, is the act of abandoning yourself in order to survive.

But after pre-tending comes…. the tending. The ongoing, never-ending project of tending to ourselves.

I didn’t come to this conclusion quickly, by the way. I’ve truly spent the last four years trying to ‘heal’ as though it was a final destination, only to realise that feeling like I am failing at my healing is rather convenient for the wellbeing industry – because it keeps me coming back for more, always looking for the magic solution to my healing woes.

But when I think about switching from healing to tending, I believe we can finally allow ourselves to surrender to the messy, ongoing experience of taking care of ourselves.

Think of if this way — we don’t tend to a garden with the idea that one day it will be complete. We tend to a garden in the knowledge that it is an ever-changing ecosystem that benefits from regular care, and with every moment of care we deliver, we trust that the ecosystem will benefit, even when we don’t see immediate results.

In crisis, we often outsource that tending to others. We talk to friends who validate us. We ask therapists to diagnose us. We lean on family. I needed all of that. But eventually, the long-term work becomes internal, and cannot be carried out by anyone but ourselves.

rebuilding self-trust

Tending, for me, has meant learning to recognise my inner voice. The one that knew the truth long before I could say it out loud. The one that found an alternative route through chronic pain and came screaming out after decades of silence. It has meant noticing when fear gets so loud that I have to dig and dig until I can locate that voice again. It has meant accepting that this process is messy, and often, unpleasant.

There have been cycles of shame, anger, and judgement. Often, I can see that these reactions are directed at parts of myself I am still reluctant to love, and that my self-compassion has been conditional. But even noticing that offers a chance to course-correct.

If pretending was pouring poison onto my own roots, tending is choosing repeatedly to nourish them, instead.

It isn’t quick. It isn’t painless. But we always have the chance to shift from performance to tending.

The question isn’t whether we have pretended. Most of us have, most of us will again in the fuut

The question is whether we are willing to tend to what we once abandoned with enough patience and love to let something truer grow in its place.