Some Rights Reserved by Jeff Bauche at Flickr

Dreams are what they are, and I won’t try to explain them in rational or symbolic terms. The feeling of this one was all good. It came as recovery was at last getting to be the real thing.

After a long and baffling night I was running back to my hotel room. I was feeling fine but realized as I went inside the hotel that I wasn’t at all sure I knew which room was mine. As I stepping into the elevator, though, the doubt quickly vanished. Everything was perfectly clear.

I had been at a strange party that seemed like the enactment of a play or TV drama. An old friend of mine was there who offered to explain what was going on. She didn’t use words but demonstrated what it meant by acting out scenes, and I became a part of the play.

Then her whole appearance changed. She was transformed into a witch-like figure. Her face was distorted with a heavy jaw, her back curved forward, and she had long straight hair like an overdone wig. She was showing that the drama had something to do with hidden depths coming to the surface, and I was trying to persuade her that I really did fit in. I was changing too.

My own face felt different. As I ran my fingers over cheeks and forehead, I touched several patches that creased like paper. I thought they must have come from a torn-up mask. Each ragged piece was stuck in place with the stinging glue that actors use for fake beards. Looking around for a mirror, I noticed a woman staring at me. She laughed and said: You can’t be serious – or are you? She went off for a moment but never came back – though I was expecting her.

A man was sitting and reading, not far from where I stood. We had once worked together and had fought each other constantly. He didn’t seem to recognize me, and I realized he couldn’t because of the disguise. But then he looked at me closely with those dark eyes of his that now had a gleam of derision. He turned back to his book and muttered: I’d say you need a new face.

Finally I found a mirror and got a good look at the patchy bits that set my face all askew. I looked completely absurd. The broken cheeks were painted with a reddish brown beard, one cheekbone looked higher than the other, and the eyebrows were straight black lines set diagonally at an odd angle to one another. No wonder I’d driven that woman away. This wasn’t like a conventional horror mask; it was just a grotesque mess. I started to tear it off and watched my face gradually reassemble itself.

I fled that crazy place, still pulling off those patches. Bits of them were clinging stubbornly, but I kept rubbing the skin until every trace was gone. I skipped the elevator and started down the many flights of stairs as fast as I could. They seemed endless, but at last I opened a door into a vast lobby. I rushed straight for the great glass entrance doors and pushed through.

There before me was a flood-lit marble plaza that overlooked the night lights of the city. It was high above the street, and a stairway of at least a hundred steps was the only way down. I wondered for a moment how the hotel had turned into this monumental structure, but I couldn’t stop to figure that out. I needed to get away as fast as I could and began leaping downward, two deep steps at a time.

I passed someone I must have met once, but his name escaped me. In any case, I didn’t know him well enough to say hello and thought perhaps he was an actor. He looked different than I remembered, with dark glasses completely concealing his eyes. He was with his wife, and the two were angrily trudging up those laborious steps as I flew past. Behind me, they started shouting at each other, but their voices fast receded, as I leaped faster and faster downward toward the street.

I jumped the last steps to the sidewalk and took off running. That’s when I started to worry I might not find the hotel where I was staying. I kept running anyway. It was exhilarating, and, as the fresh night air filled my lungs, a clear map of the way came suddenly to mind. I knew exactly where I was going.

I felt completely happy and in some way right.

Some Rights Reserved by AngelsWings at Flickr

Do you think it’s possible to be going through some phase of depression and have your emotions so locked away inside you that you don’t notice a thing? I’ve written about feeling anger and rage and never associating those feelings with depression, though they were tightly bound together. But here I’m thinking of an earlier time in my life – mostly in high school and college.

Through the teenage years, I sealed all feeling up tight. I guess that was an extension of childhood and being one of those kids teachers admired as so precocious, so adult. The other kids might rage, cry, scream where I would analyze and shake my head at their childish behavior. That distancing got more extreme as a teenager. I didn’t show anything but mildly friendly feeling to anyone. I did feel things deeply, at least fear, anxiety and anger – but these were no-shows externally. I was calmly cheerful most of the time. There was a mask in place, and the only symptom I thought I had were frequent migraines. But that was something inherited from my mother. I knew that because she explained it to me as she lay on the sofa sinking fast into her own depression. I would grow out of that, she said.

There was a gradual loosening up in college when my life seemed to make up some rather amusing anecdotes. I remember laughing off the splintering of my family – Mom staying in New York, Dad off to Florida and the Bahamas, my brother first to the Bahamas, then as far away as he could get – to Australia, (where he still lives) and I to college, never to return to anything like a home.

I would toss off things like that and laughingly move on to the next story. Of course, there were odd things going on too. I had a great interest in acting, but if I couldn’t perform in front of a group, I was lost in what would now be called social anxiety. Back then I called it agony. A screen went up in dealing with even a handful of people I didn’t know. I froze, projecting judgment, condemnation, contempt for me into the first glance of a new person. I seemed cut off by an invisible membrane of pure tension. And naturally, if I could say anything at all, words would be shaped out of the anxiety waves emanating from me. They often made no sense or were some inept joke – I usually felt I wasn’t the one talking. It was the idiot I had already planted in the new person’s mind who carried my name, my face.

Going to parties, especially the arranged mixers between men’s and women’s schools, provided opportunities for total humiliation. I often took advantage of those. The guys would usually arrive first and take up their watchdog stations in some common-room where these encounters took place. A moment would arrive when the young women would march in the door, often in single file and be picked off by the waiting marksmen. Little time to choose, just get to your choice before anyone else did. At one of these, I lurched at an appropriately good-looking blond and proceeded to mash suitably intellectual references into my smalltalk. We were doing OK, that is, I wasn’t assuming an English accent or otherwise going into deep disguise, when she suddenly suggested going for a walk. Aha! What else were these events all about but getting off into a secluded spot for some action.

What she really wanted to do, though, was to play squash. That made sense since she was freshman crew and screamed fitness through every pore. I, however, did not. In fact, sports involving round projectiles speeding in my direction seemed rather hostile. Having the eye-hand coordination of the Hulk and the depth perception of a Cyclops, I was a little off my game – any game, at any time. I also had a way of getting strangely entranced by the sight of a ball heading right at me. More than once I would just watch that thing get bigger and bigger and then – thwack. For example, I took my first tennis serve in the throat.

Squash uses a very nasty hard little ball that shoots around at light speed. This was not promising, but I dutifully took up my position in the court, my confident party mask beginning to crack. Smiling, the blond crew captain launched the ball, and I watched it rocket off the far wall and then disappear behind me where it hit another flat surface, bounced fiercely and punched me in the back. Meanwhile I had sifted the air nicely with a marvelous swing. OK, this happened a second time, though the ball didn’t hit me, and she graciously suggested that it might work better if I served. Sure, I said.

On the second swing I triumphantly connected, only to see the rubber bullet blast through that very spot in the air where my partner’s head had been before she hit the floor. It was now a huge effort of will to keep my mask in place, though a smile, even a little laugh came through, as the blond athlete suggested that a game of pool might be better. We walked off the court to the snickers from the gallery above of two of my roommates who had wandered in. I was immersed, even drowning in shame and humiliation, but still the brave, only slightly reddened face spoke no feeling except a bit of self-deprecating amusement. “I guess it’s not my thing,” I smilingly managed to say.

What I came to understand later on was that it took a vast amount of energy and willpower to keep the natural feelings and reactions bottled and capped. And another burst to construct and keep in place the persona I needed to project to the world. While I was doing this, I was always thinking: Oh, this is just an act. Wait till they see what I’m really like. Of course, I didn’t really know the extent of all I was keeping hidden. That included a lot of pain, hurt, grief, anger that I was not even aware of. After a while, I had to face the fact that I had become a concealed person and couldn’t just put a mask aside. There was too much at stake – it was too risky to relax. Nor was I aware of everything in me that was trying to push that mask aside forever.

How does that painful emotional history break through to consciousness so that at least you start to know there is plenty to work on? What can produce that shock of recognition that begins the process of recovery?