There was a version of me the world loved. Her name was Christel.
She was the girl I introduced in interviews, on dating apps, in group chats where I’d fake screenshots just to prove I was wanted. She had flawless skin, hair that sat just right in every mirror, and a voice that always knew what to say. People liked her. Sometimes they even loved her.
But Christel wasn’t real.
I made her up when I was fifteen. It started with a better angle on a photo, a lighter filter, a lie about where I was. “Out with friends,” I’d say, while sitting alone in the corner of my room, listening to the sound of my stomach growling over the shouting downstairs. I crafted her out of loneliness, stitched her together from bits of girls people celebrated and praised.
At home, I didn’t even have a bed.
My mother said I didn’t deserve one — hadn’t earned it yet. So I made my own. I bunched together old clothes, scraps of fabric, and things that smelled like dust and silence. That was my bed. I laid on that pile every night, trying to convince myself I wasn’t cold. That I wasn’t unwanted. But the truth lived in the ache of my back and the way the floor creaked when I shifted in the dark.
I didn’t have clean clothes either. No proper sanitary products. No privacy. No softness. Nothing of my own. There was no “home” in that house, just the constant echo of what I wasn’t. I was highly neglected. But no one saw, because no one ever really looked.
At school, the bullying was relentless — the way I dressed, the way I smelled, the way my skin sat on me like a burden. “Big nose.” “Too dark.” “Too fat.” “Too poor.” Caribbean culture doesn’t always have the words for emotional abuse, but it sure has sharp tongues, and I learned early how deep they could cut. Being the first-born daughter meant pressure. Being a daughter who didn’t fit the mould meant rejection. My brothers got love. I got silence, or worse — the kind of attention that makes you wish for silence.
So I gave the world someone they could love. I gave them Christel.
She was bold, flirtatious, well-read. She loved jazz. She never asked for too much. I edited her into pictures with other people. Faked messages. Stole money to afford clothes she’d wear. Wrote elaborate posts so she sounded smart, then screenshotted the reactions and read them like bedtime stories.
Validation was her currency. And I, the girl behind the mask, was starving.
But the problem with building a person from scratch is that you can’t ever live in her skin full-time. Eventually, people want to see you in real life. They want to meet. They want more.
And you can’t Photoshop your presence.
Friendships crumbled the closer they got. Relationships stayed surface-level, lost in a maze of carefully chosen lighting and distance. No one stayed. Because no one ever really knew me — they only knew her.
It was one night, just past 3AM, when I realised she never lived here.
I’d just finished writing a long message to someone — a guy I liked. Or rather, a guy I wanted to like Christel. I told him stories about “my” childhood ballet classes, my summer in Paris, the way my mum always made hot chocolate after rainstorms.
None of it was true.
I stared at the message, and for once, didn’t hit send. Something in me just… cracked. Not loudly. Not violently. Just the sound of something hollow echoing against itself.
I looked around my room — the one with the peeling posters, the worn mattress I never had, the pile of old clothes that passed as my bed. I caught my reflection in the black of my phone screen. No filter. No twist of the chin. Just me.
And I realised — Christel has never once slept in this bed.
She never cried in this corner.
She never avoided the kitchen when shouting started.
She never knew what it felt like to be forgotten in a room full of people who were supposed to love you.
She never went to school hoping the fire alarm would go off so she could hide her face in the crowd.
She never flinched when someone said, “You’re lucky to even have a roof.”
Christel was never real. But I built my whole life around her.
It wasn’t a dramatic collapse. There was no movie moment, no shouting to the heavens. I just… stopped pretending.
Little by little, I let go.
I deleted fake messages. I archived stories. I stopped editing my pictures to match the girl in my head. When people asked me what I liked, I didn’t look for an answer they’d respect — I gave them the truth. I gave them me.
It was awkward. Sometimes painful. People I’d once impressed disappeared. They weren’t interested in this version. But I didn’t blame them — I’d never asked them to love me in the first place. I’d given them someone else.
The strange thing about waking up is how quiet it is.
Without the performance, there’s no applause. Just breath. Stillness. A mirror that doesn’t flinch. A heart that beats anyway.
Some days I miss her — the power she had. The way people leaned in when she spoke, even if it was all borrowed. But now, when I walk into a room, I don’t float on the cloud of Christel. I walk in with my own feet. Sometimes heavy. Always real.
And even if no one claps, at least I know I’m not lying when I smile.
