Why is it so easy to spend on the exterior… and so hard to give anything to what lives within?

The night has its own kind of silence — not the hollow kind that echoes like an empty room, but the thick, breathing silence that settles gently on the soul, like dew on a forgotten leaf. In these quiet hours, when the world softens into shadow and time no longer rushes, questions begin to rise from the depths like whispers from a hidden well. Questions that the daylight is too loud to hear. Why is it so easy to spend on the exterior… and so hard to give anything to what lives within?

People spend money on nails polished to perfection, on hair smoothed and styled to disguise the exhaustion behind their eyes, on clothes that shimmer under artificial lights, on cigarettes that turn their breath into smoke. There is almost a ritualistic devotion to the exterior — as though the surface were an altar and everything else a footnote. Day after day, layer after layer, they tend to the image in the mirror while the soul waits in the dark, quiet, patient, unseen.

It isn’t about the nails, or the dresses, or the cigarettes. It’s about the strange reluctance to turn inward, to give even a fragment of what we so freely give to appearances… to the soft, fragile architecture of the psyche. To therapy. To healing. To soul work. The inner world rarely receives the offerings that the outer one does.

And yet, the psyche remembers. It keeps score in silence, like a hidden pulse beneath the surface of the skin. The wound waits. Sometimes it waits for years. It leaks through sleepless nights, through a sudden, unexplained ache in the chest, through quiet despair that visits without knocking. And still, people say, almost casually, “I don’t have money for therapy.” As if therapy were a luxury. As if tending to the soul were optional.

But how strange — there is always enough for the salon, the boutique, the cigarette pack. As if it’s easier to polish a mask than to face what breathes beneath it.

Inside the mind, a different landscape unfolds. A quiet room. A lake without ripples. There is no mirror here, no makeup, no fabric, no distraction. Only breath. And in that breath, memory. And in that memory, silence. This is the space therapy touches — the place where the unconscious lives, where the child still waits behind a door that was never opened, where pain curls like smoke in the corners of forgotten rooms.

Psychoanalysis teaches that beneath every symptom there is a story. Beneath fear — a longing. Beneath longing — a wound. Beneath the wound — a sacred silence, a space where something still hopes to be heard. And that silence… that is where healing begins. Not in glitter, not in bright rooms, not in carefully curated appearances. But in the quiet. In the return.

To choose therapy is to choose to sit with the soul, to knock on that closed door and whisper, “I’m ready now.” It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t sparkle. It doesn’t give you something to show off. It gives you only yourself — stripped of pretense, trembling, raw. But that is the place where grace begins to move, slowly, like water finding its way through stone.

Why is it easier to buy a dress than to buy an hour of silence? Why is it easier to paint the exterior than to unearth the inner shadows? Perhaps because the dress promises control. The exterior offers quick transformation — instant, visible, celebrated. But the soul demands surrender. It demands that you stand naked before your own truth, without the protection of appearances.

I have seen people build entire lives around avoiding this surrender. They decorate the edges of their pain with expensive fabrics, fill their lungs with smoke to quiet the whispers, collect objects that keep their hands busy so their hearts don’t have to speak. But the soul… it never stops calling. Sometimes gently, like the sound of water against stones. Sometimes with the sharp cry of a sleepless night. Sometimes with an illness that has no name.

Mental health is not a luxury. It is a root. Without it, everything else is decoration on hollow ground. No manicure can hold a soul together. No hairstyle can soften the ache of a mind unraveling. No accessory can replace the quiet embrace of being seen — truly seen — by oneself.

Spirituality, in its truest form, does not separate from psychology. They are two rivers feeding the same ocean. Therapy can be a kind of prayer — not spoken to the heavens, but whispered into the depths. A conversation not with a distant God, but with the divine that lives in your breath, your memory, your shadow. To tend to your psyche is to kneel at an invisible altar. To honor the sacredness of your pain.

People often say they pray for peace. But sometimes, peace doesn’t come as a miracle — it comes as a therapist’s quiet voice, as a breath slowly exhaled in a safe room, as the moment you finally stop running. Sometimes God answers not with thunder, but with silence that invites you to sit still and listen.

To care for your inner world is to return home. To light a small candle in a room long abandoned. It is not grand. It is not loud. It is soft, and trembling, and holy. But it changes everything.

When you choose to give money to your soul — instead of only your image — you are saying: I am worth being known. I am worth healing. This is not self-indulgence. This is responsibility. It’s a way of saying, “I will no longer build temples to my own avoidance.”

I imagine the soul sometimes as a child sitting at a closed door, knees tucked beneath its chin, waiting. Not screaming, not demanding, just waiting for the sound of footsteps returning. And while we buy, and polish, and distract, the child waits. Therapy is not the hero. It’s just the act of opening the door.

World Mental Health Day is not a celebration in the conventional sense. It’s a whispered invitation to return. To admit that we are fragile. To honor that fragility instead of burying it beneath layers of gloss. To remember that we are more than our surfaces.

Maybe one day, we will stop saying “I can’t afford therapy” with the same ease as “I’ll get my nails done next week.” Because the truth is, the soul cannot be put on hold like an appointment. The soul is breathing even when we pretend not to hear it. The soul is the house we live in.

When we finally give it our attention — when we invest time, energy, resources — something happens. Something quiet. Something sacred. The light returns, not as fireworks but as dawn — soft, slow, unstoppable.

This is not about abandoning beauty. It’s about remembering where beauty begins. Not in the mirror, but in the silence. Not in the accessories, but in the breath. Not in what the world sees, but in what only you can feel.

Mental health is not a trend. It’s the soil from which everything else grows. And when the soil is tended, even the smallest flowers bloom with a light that no salon, no dress, no mask can imitate.

Tonight, as the world sleeps, I whisper this prayer — not to the sky, but inward:
May we remember the soul. May we have the courage to return to it. May we choose healing over performance. And may we finally, softly, open the door.