Hey, all! Help me in welcoming Derora Noo! You’re going to love her!

I’ve always wanted to go to Montana. Remember the film Legends of the Fall? Wrecks me every time. I manage to keep it together while Native Americans are displaced, Samuel dies, and love is abandoned. I start to tip when Tristan’s wife is killed, and I lose it completely when Susannah meets Tristan’s son Samuel. By the time Susannah cuts off her hair and shoots herself, I’m inconsolable, mostly because everyone has put such a pretty, stoic face on their pain.

The only thing saving me from being seduced by all this Grade A romanticized suffering is Tristan’s “good death” at the end, by bear-fight. It’s a fitting and rugged resolution, and it centers me again, reconciling me to all things inexorable, like death, sorrow, and bad sex.

We’re all heroes of our own movies. Some of us may self-dramatize more than others, but I think it’s fair to say we all, at times, present a reductive version of ourselves. Sometimes it’s for the benefit of others.

Often it’s because the truth overwhelms us.

About 10 years ago, I took a summer program in classical acting. One day after class, a student and I were sitting on the stoop outdoors, waiting for our rides. She was upset about something, and her sense of being wronged resulted in a bitterness she didn’t seem to know what to do with. I listened, and then she glared at me and said, “You wouldn’t know anything about this. Look at you. You’ve never had to deal with this kind of thing.”

It was a moment that gave me insight into how others viewed me, and it wasn’t at all what I expected. Defending myself seemed pointless; I accepted what she said and made the lonely mental note that, because of my appearance of togetherness, chances were good that people would stick with their initial assumptions about me, and not fathom the depth of my problems.

And who was I to disabuse anyone of their assumptions? Was I supposed to tell people that, when I was four, my father left me to be raised by someone who was, most likely, clinically depressed, and who later (and regretfully) told me she bullied me when I was little? Was I supposed to volunteer that we were on welfare when I was a child, and that the bulk of my clothes were from clearance bins or trash bags of damaged clothes? Why would anyone care that I had gone to 12 schools and had worked six jobs in college while my half-sister, my dad’s second child, was raised in a life of relative privilege, with trips to Europe, a horse, piano lessons, and private school tuition. It wasn’t my job to explain my struggles. I could never find the words anyway, because I didn’t fully understand them. I lived in a terrible space of rage pointed inward.

And now, after this exchange, I felt even more alone.

So I developed a character—a character that others would be comfortable with, that I’d be comfortable with. I dressed nicely on a budget, I worked as hard as I could at everything I did, and I found tiny reasons to get up each day.

Most people had no idea anything was wrong.

A few weeks ago, in a post about heartbreak, I compared being depressed to lugging a bear trap around. You can’t remove it, but, hey, it’s on your non-dominant arm, so you can do most of the things any able-bodied person can do. Maybe the bones have knit and the skin has healed around the wound, so it’s not even bleeding. It only hurts if it’s jostled unexpectedly. You’ve adjusted your posture and gait so well to compensate for it that others don’t even notice. Hey, that’s what bell sleeves are for, right?

You’re determined to present a positive version of yourself, so you can get ahead at work, so your friends don’t pull a fade-away, so maybe one day you’ll actually believe you’re okay. Your therapist tells you, “Fake it ‘til you make it,” and that becomes your mantra. Your suffering is hidden, and that’s fine, because what you’re going through is ugly and has no words.

You’re a good actor.

You fool a lot of people, but you can’t fool yourself. The bear trap has a way of reminding you, of keeping you tight in its jaws.

And really, if you’re being honest, your friends aren’t fooled. At least not the ones who get close to you. Your personality is forced, your conversations are circular, and you have a habit of nursing painful events you can’t resolve. Your reactions to setbacks are disproportionate in size. You can’t find the spring on the trap that will set you free, though you repeatedly and methodically go over every inch of it. You’re convinced you’re responsible for the trap in the first place, which is really rather egotistical of you. Your mind is in a trap of destructive habits of thinking.

But keeping up the façade at least gives you the sense that you’re doing something.

You become a better actor over the years.  You’re always on the lookout for clues to “normal.” You mimic the healthy behaviors of your friends and coworkers—strangers are great gifts. You manage your anxiety in social situations, giving yourself permission to evacuate. You learn how to ask people about themselves, and how to smile and believe that there really is good in the world, even if you’re going on faith.

You’re faking it, and you’re almost making it. Sometimes.

You also learn that when you spill everything right up front to non-bear-trap people, they tend to run away. But sometimes you can’t help it, because you want to believe that someone will understand you, will help you.

Recently I made a new friend—really just an acquaintance, not even a date kind of thing—and we were opening up a little after having spent some time together. He offered that he didn’t have much of an appetite lately because he was a little depressed. Aha! A fellow bear-trapper! I said, “I totally know what you mean. I can’t eat when I’m depressed either. It’s hard to believe I’m even worth food.”

The look on his face told me I had seriously miscalculated things. There was no bear trap on this guy. He was just stressed about work.

See, there’s always a tell, something that tags you as a bear trap person. And then everything in the friendship shifts, dammit.

Occasionally you meet other bear trap people, maybe you even sleep with them until you realize their desire for you isn’t based on you as a separate person, but you as a bear trap person who might take on their trap as well. You keep finding yourself enmeshed in troubled relationships. And you know it’s you, it must be you, it happens over and over. It doesn’t seem to happen to other people.

I once had a kidney stone. I was 21. I’d taken some NyQuil for a cold and gone to bed. Hours later, a horrible pain woke me. I tried to ignore it—you know, because that always works so well—but it just got worse. I tried to think of positive things, but all I could think was how everything alive eventually suffers and dies—flowers, pets, Jesus. As the pain became unbearable, something amazing happened. I began to wish that I wouldn’t die. I was relieved to have found, buried under my severe (and at that point undiagnosed) depression, a part of me that wanted to live.

So I woke up my mother.

She was groggy for a bit, but when I said, “I don’t want to die,” she shot up. I was seriously scared, and I meant what I said, but I also cringed at saying something so dramatic. She and a neighbor threw me in the back of a station wagon and drove me to the emergency room.

The staff on duty asked if I’d taken any drugs or alcohol. I was nearly passing out, so I’m sure I looked like a drug overdose. I told them just the NyQuil. They stripped me and I lay there, splayed for all the world to see, while they explored me for clues—needle tracks, bruises. My mother said that’s when she knew I was in serious pain, because I was the most modest person she’d ever known.

They diagnosed a kidney stone and explained it was as if my kidney were having contractions. Okay. Hours went by. I could barely open my eyes from the pain, so I lay there, conserving my energy. Finally, they jabbed a needle in my thigh and it felt so good—it was a re-set button on the pain. Turns out they had waited for hours for the NyQuil to leave my system. Had I known, I could’ve told them it was the first thing I’d thrown up.

The painkiller kicked right in, and all of a sudden I was sitting up, smiling, and chatting. I was so grateful to be free from pain. Apparently, my sudden animation informed my previous quietness with the insight that I’d been in a whole lot more pain than the staff had thought. They hadn’t known. After all, I was so quiet, why would they know?

But now I was free.

And that’s where I am now. For decades I held on and I worked hard. When I was 21 I started my first round of therapy. I told myself there was a chance that maybe I’d someday be out of pain, even though it might take ‘til I was 85. Who was I to decide to check out early? I became determined to present the most positive, competent front I could, when I really wanted to give in and curl up.

It took years of single-mindedness, a stack of self-help books, three or four rounds of cognitive behavioral therapy, some new age therapies, and many kind-hearted people, but eventually, I unhinged my trap of depression—I wore it down or rusted it open, or something. I’m not sure what gave me the final push into psychological health; I just knew that something big was at stake and it was now or never. My life was going by year after year in a way that felt very wrong. I had to give up everything I believed fiercely, everything that had gotten me trapped in the first place.

First I stopped trusting my self-destructive thoughts, and then I sprung myself completely by replacing them with new, healthy thoughts that seemed positively outlandish. I don’t mean to make it sound easy—I often felt like I was tricking myself into believing and behaving positively.

I used to cry every day; now I cry every few months. I have bad days sometimes, but they don’t turn into months and years. Sometimes the bad feelings worry me if they linger for a few days, but I’m now armed with tools to understand and manage them, to keep them from clamping down on me.

And I know I’ll always have scars. There will always be a tell when I get close to someone.

I’m compelled to blog about this because when I was struggling to find emotional health, the thing that helped the most was finding perfect strangers online I could relate to. Often that’s all that kept me going. I’ve always been a writer, and blogging gave me a way to anesthetize my feelings and push them into some sort of form that was useful to me. For years I’ve wanted to try and make it all add up to something, to give what I went through some sort of comprehensive, elegant meaning.

I think ultimately that’s really kind of impossible, because the only thing that can give it meaning is you.

Fake it ‘til you make it.

Meanwhile, maybe I’ll see you in Montana.