when you think of Maddie Buckley and her character growth, it starts with her being a nine year old child being told that she is not allowed to grieve, and that moment becomes the first time she’s ever told she has to lie, and she has to pretend. she’s told it’s to protect her baby brother, whilst knowing that no one is trying to protect her.
it starts with Buck always knowing something was wrong with her but never knowing what because she’d buried it so deep, she thought she could carry that burden so heavily, “I always felt like you were sad, too”
and then she’s nineteen years old and she meets Doug Kendall and suddenly she’s trust into a world of even more lies, even more hiding the truth, even more pretending for the sake of the people around her, “come on, maddie, you don’t need to pretend with me”
police knock the door, questions are being asked by the people in her life but she shoves it down, she tries her best to live two versions of her life - one behind closed doors and the other outside of it. and she does that for sixteen years. lying and pretending is for her own survival. until we see her finally run to her brother and she brushes it off “kind of sounds like you’re hiding out,” “no, more like… laying low”
and we see it over the years we know her as an audience, her constantly shoving her feelings down, lying to protect herself and the people around her, pretending because she doesn’t know what else to do or who else to be because she cannot burden anyone else with her pain or her grief or the weight of her secrets. we see it with Doug but we also see it with everything after him. her resulting ptsd, her trying to brush everything off.
we meet her parents and we see the pain they caused her, we see her trying to focus on just being a big sister and try to brush off every cruel word that falls from their lips. we see her struggling with the secret, but pretending is all she knows, it is all she has experienced and all she has seen.
her postpartum depression was coated in the guilt of her own suffering after giving birth, so she purposely isolates herself, she asks chimney not to tell anyone, she starts pushing him away, telling him it’s not his job. no one has a clue that anything is wrong with her or that she’s hurting, she pushes it down until she can’t anymore and she’s standing in the ocean, remembering every self perceived failure in her life.
and then we see her after Boston and she’s right back to where she was just before it. shoving it down, pretending as though she is fine, lying to Buck and to Chimney because no matter what she has this innate desire to protect the people she loves from herself.
Maddie Buckley is an actress by design - all she has been taught to do her entire life is to hide, pretend, act like everything is fine, lie if she has to. and we didn’t see that start to crack until she told chimney she was done apologising at the beginning of season six and then when she said the words “when I was sick” to her brother for the first time and made it clear there suddenly, she’s not trying to protect him from her pain anymore, she’s not going to pretend like it never happened or that it never existed. and the moment she stopped acting as though her feelings didn’t matter, we saw her open an entirely new door to her relationship with her brother in particular, we saw them act like true, goofy siblings at the end of season six for the first time.
and her not being able to lie to Hen, her not being able to keep a secret despite the fact she’s been trained to keep secrets her entire life, shows just how far she’s come. she doesn’t have to pretend anymore, she doesn’t even try, not with her brother, not with chimney and not with the people in her life.
and the amount of growth and healing it has taken her to get to the point where lying and faking and having to have a good poker face, seems completely impossible to her is truly so beautiful. she has absolutely no desire or need to protect anyone around her or to fight for her own survival, she’s just Maddie Buckley (soon to be -Han) and for the first time in her whole life, she can just be exactly who she has always been, and never been allowed to be.
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