Good morning, Arcadia. Isn’t it just a beautiful day?

The sky, that sickly yellow hue, trying its best to mimic something softer. The air sour with the smell of steel and spilled oil from the poor levels. And yet the light still appears each morning. And Mister Sunshine still smiles.

The man who turned grief into a jingle. The man who packaged the human condition in primary colours and fed it to children like it was medicine, closing their mouths and telling them to swallow the pill he was was feeding them.

Sunshine, you sang your songs in front of felt trees and cardboard clouds. You waved your painted hands and taught little minds how to hide their pain behind polite smiles. And when they took your cameras away, when Olympus offered you a new pulpit, you clutched your little sun-shaped megaphone and kept shouting anyway. Spread a little sunshine.

But let me ask you something, Sunny Boy. What do you find when the spotlight flickers and you finally feel the weight of the floor beneath your feet? What crawls out when the cracks start showing and the music stops? Because I’ve felt it. The concrete. The cold. I keep my freaks close and they don’t smile unless there’s something to smile about.”

They scream. They weep. They beg to be seen. And I see them. I see them like nobody else sees them.

You? You bleach the world. You take sorrow, fear, fury – all those beautiful, necessary truths – and you scrub them away with slogans and saccharine.

You are not joy. You are denial.

And now, you’ve wandered into my tent.

This isn’t the Sunshine Club. There are no dancing puppets here. No laugh tracks. Here, the only applause comes from hands that know grief, and the only stage lights are held up by rusted nails and an ocean of pain. I don’t perform miracles. I don’t preach happiness. I deal in honesty – raw, unadulterated honesty – and when you stand across from me in that ring, you’ll feel it.

You’ll remember every child who swallowed sadness because you told them it was impolite to cry. Every broken soul who pasted on a grin and tried to heal with hope alone. You’ll feel the weight of the lies you told for the sake of a brand. And you’ll smile through it. Because that’s what you’ve trained yourself to do.

But I’ll be watching. I’ll be watching that smile twitch. That mask shift. That sunshine flicker into something desperate and cracked and real.

And when that moment comes – not with a bang, but with the quiet snapping of the self, maybe you’ll finally get it.

I think you try to force that eternal sunshine because you’re afraid of what will happen if the dark catches up to you. But you can’t drown the dark. You have to sit in it. You have to know it. You have to let it take your hand.

Only then can you see what’s truly worth smiling for.

Welcome to the freak show, let us show you The Way.