Ask any person with a chronic illness, disability, or chronic pain. Every single person will tell you the same exact thing: We all put on a show. Why do we do this? We do this for several reasons. We do this to make it easier to live with and deal with. We do this so that we don’t appear sick to others. And we do this to help others in our PsA community by helping one another, sticking together, understanding that by putting on a show, we can appear stronger together. 

I put on a show for myself all the time. I pretend that I have more energy. Or when I have energy, I act like my energy is endless. I clean my house. I wash all the bed sheets. I do outside gardening. I organize closets or drawers. I know I can’t trick myself. I know I don’t have endless energy. I know that I can’t continue doing things like this forever. I know the result is that I will hit a wall and drop. I know it will end in a flare. I will have pain and will be exhausted, fatigued, and will swear to never do it again … but we know I will do it repeatedly. Why? Somehow, it still feels good to be able to do it. I love to prove to myself that I can do it no matter what the result is. It feels good to me as a type A personality to push myself when possible. For a moment, whenever possible, I like to put on a show. I like to pretend I am normal, or even Superwoman. I just want to have that. I want that for myself, so I will still put on a show for myself.

It is likely more understandable that we put on a show for others. We do this so we don’t appear as sick as we are. I don’t like people to know the amount of pain I am experiencing unless, of course, they are part of my support group and we are specifically discussing our painful experience. People don’t understand anyway unless they are also dealing with the same pain or illness or something similar. And generally speaking, people don’t want to understand the pain of PsA. We wear a facade to make it easier for other people to accept what we are dealing with. Wearing a mask hides the reality of the actual disease, the pain, the disability, the loss of what we used to have and used to do. 

We also do this for our PsA community. It makes us stronger when we see each other putting on a show for one another. I’ll explain: When I see a fellow PsA patient putting on a show as someone strong and resilient, it makes me feel like I can be that way also. We help each other by being examples of strength and resilience. It may just be masks that we wear in our PsA community, but we know they are wearing masks. We still look at one another and want to be like them. We want to set an example, too. We want to be strong and resilient. We want others to look up to us. 

Putting on a show doesn’t have to be a negative thing. It can be positive if we use it as a positive; if we use it to help get through the diagnosis of PsA. If we wear the mask of being someone who can do many things and who has lots of energy, we can possibly get things done that we had wanted to. If we see it as a positive in the strength and resilience of fellow PsA patients, it can help us to put on a mask also to give us strength and resilience. It is OK to sometimes wear the mask and put on a show. We just must be careful that we aren’t hiding behind the mask. If we find ourselves hiding all the time, it can become dangerous because we won’t know who we truly are.

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