The Mask

I have been to the Maldives.

Let that sink in for a moment, because it still sinks in for me. I traveled for over 48 hours straight — planes, layovers, transfers, more planes — to reach a place I had never even heard of a few months earlier. I have hiked in the Rocky Mountains, felt the altitude press against my chest in the best possible way. I have stood in a field in Telluride, Colorado, surrounded by bluegrass music and mountain air and people who looked genuinely, effortlessly happy.

I am blessed. I know that. I have always known that.

And yet.

Underneath every single one of those trips — underneath the photos and the wonder and the "can you believe this place?" — I was drowning. Not quietly, not gracefully. Drowning the way you drown when you are trying very hard not to look like you are drowning. Anxious. Pressured. Agitated. Exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the 48 hours of travel and everything to do with the weight I was carrying inside my own head.

I was masking. Every single ounce of what I was feeling, I was hiding.

On the outside, I was put together. That has always been my default setting — composed, capable, the person who figures it out. The person who books the trip, packs the right things, smiles in the photos. On the inside, I was crumbling. There is no softer word for it. Crumbling.

What people don't talk about enough — what I wish someone had told me years ago — is how exhausting it is to mask. Not just tiring. Labor intensive. It is a full-time job layered on top of whatever else you are supposed to be doing. When you are standing in front of one of the most beautiful places on earth and your brain is simultaneously managing anxiety, suppressing panic, performing calm, and trying to actually be present — you are doing the work of three people. And none of them are getting paid.

It feels fake. And that is not a word I would ever use to describe myself. I have always prided myself on being real. Honest. What you see is what you get. Except — it wasn't. Not during those years. Not during those trips. What you saw was a carefully constructed version of me that was working very, very hard to stay upright.

I have since learned that what I was doing has a name. Clinicians call it high-functioning masking — the conscious, relentless effort to appear "normal" while managing the internal chaos of bipolar disorder. It is not a diagnosis. It is a coping mechanism. And it is far more common than anyone talks about.

Here is what it looked like for me, though I didn't have the language for it at the time. During hypomanic stretches, I worked at a pace that looked like ambition. I booked the trips, planned the itineraries, stayed up too late, got up too early, and called it productivity. The world rewarded that. Nobody questions the person who gets things done. During the low stretches, I pushed through anyway — showed up, performed, smiled — while privately feeling worthless and hollowed out. I called it "being busy." I called it "needing alone time." What I was doing was withdrawing just enough to survive without anyone noticing the shift.

The irritability was the hardest to hide. I could feel it — this internal pressure, like something was always about to boil over — and I would hold it together in public and fall apart at home, in private, where it felt safe to let the seams show. If you have ever been on the receiving end of that, I am sorry. I didn't understand what was happening. I just knew I couldn't let it out where people could see.

I think about the Maldives a lot. The water there is a color that doesn't exist anywhere else — this impossible blue-green that looks like someone turned up the saturation on the world. I remember standing at the edge of the overwater bungalow, looking out at that water, and thinking: I should feel something right now. Something good. Why don't I feel something good?

That is what anxiety does. It steals the moment you are standing in. It takes you to the Maldives and keeps you locked inside your own head, pacing the same worn grooves of worry and dread, while the most beautiful water in the world sits right in front of you.

Alcohol was supposed to help with that. And for a while — in the way that things work for a while before they don't — it did. A drink at the airport. A drink on the plane. A drink at dinner to take the edge off. The edge always came back. It always does. But in the moment, there was relief. There was a loosening. There was something that felt, briefly, like peace.

What I know now is that the alcohol wasn't treating the anxiety. It was feeding it. Every drink I had to manage the pressure was making the pressure worse. The cycle was invisible to me for a long time. It is very hard to see the thing that is hurting you when it is also the thing that feels like it is helping you.

There is also a cost to masking that I didn't fully understand until I stopped. The mental energy required to appear fine — to perform stability when you are anything but stable — is enormous. It leads to a kind of burnout that is different from ordinary exhaustion. It is the burnout of someone who has been running two lives simultaneously: the one people see and the one that is actually happening. Research suggests the average person with bipolar disorder goes undiagnosed for ten to fifteen years, in part because masking hides the condition so effectively — from doctors, from family, and from themselves. I believe that. I lived it.

The crash, when it comes, is harder than it would have been otherwise. Because you have been depleted for so long, the fall is further. I know that crash. I have been at the bottom of it. And I know that the masking — the very thing that felt like protection — was part of what made the bottom so far down.

I am not writing this to make you feel sorry for me. I am writing this because I know I am not the only one who has stood in a beautiful place and felt nothing but the weight of their own mind. I know I am not the only one who has smiled in a photo while something inside them was quietly falling apart. I know I am not the only one who has called it together when it was anything but.

If you are that person — if you are the one who looks fine on the outside and is barely holding on inside — I want you to know that the masking doesn't have to be permanent. It is not who you are. It is a coping strategy that made sense at the time and stopped making sense somewhere along the way.

The Maldives will always be beautiful. The Rocky Mountains will always be there. Telluride will always have its music and its golden light in September.

What I want for you — what I want for myself, still, every day — is to actually be there when you are there. Present. Unmasked. Feeling the thing you are supposed to feel when you are standing in front of something extraordinary.

That is what sobriety gave me. Not the absence of anxiety — I still have that, I probably always will. But the ability to be in the room. To be in the moment. To stand at the edge of something beautiful and actually feel it.

That is worth more than I can say.