Growing up in a small town in southern West Virginia, I’d always heard that a man wasn’t supposed to show his feelings. I mean, think about it, the Mountain State in those days was where generations of males put on hard hats, work boots, and brave faces before heading into the bowels of the earth to mine coal.

Don’t get me wrong, we had plenty of feelings, problems, and pain to deal with, but we kept them to ourselves. Because that’s what men were supposed to do, right?

I joined the United States Marine Corps only a few weeks after graduating from high school and was quickly overwhelmed with a world I never knew existed. And yet my experience in the military only reinforced those unwritten masculine rules I’d learned all my life.

Truth be known, I had feelings and emotions I thought no other guy had. I thought I was abnormal or weak since none of my male friends or family members talked about depression or hopelessness and such. Yet those feelings are exactly what I’d felt. And so I held it inside. Where it festered.

All the while wearing the mask.

Many who know me would say I’m the most outgoing extrovert you would ever meet. I can speak to thousands of people without a problem, holding the crowd in the palm of my hand. I can sing, play instruments on stage, and seemingly feed from the spotlight.

But what most people don’t know is when I am doing all those things, I’m doing them while wearing the mask.

You probably know the mask I’m talking about. It’s that beautifully waxed exterior on the late model sports car that has missing brake lines, a broken stereo, and more check engine and warning lights than the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant when Homer Simpson is at the helm. From all appearances, everything looks perfect. But inside, beneath the external façade, nothing could be further from the truth.

I heard Douglas Winter speaking about writing clichés many years ago, and one that stuck out to me was when a writer has a character gazing into a mirror as a means of revealing physical traits in description.

Winter went on to explain that a better use of the mirror in description would be to reveal internal flaws and issues the mirror wouldn’t normally disclose from the outward appearance. After all, when we gaze into our reflection, we see far deeper. We see our failures, our faults, and our hopelessness.

The mask is a means of concealing what we see in the mirror.

I became a voracious reader at the beginning of the fifth grade. Science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, and horror were my favorites, and horror movies became something I could use as an escape. One of the things I noticed about many scary films was that killers often wore masks. Killers like Michael Myers, Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, as well as Ghostface. I never wondered why they wore the masks; I just knew they were creepier than all get out and absolute nightmare fodder.

Meaghan Argueta listed the “Top 10 Masked Killers in Horror Movie History” for movieweb.com in October of 2023. And in her introduction to the list she wrote, “By wearing something that hides one’s face, a sense of connection is lost between people. A victim cannot see a masked killer’s expressions to gauge how they can bring out the humane side of them.”

She went on to say, “All masked killers either have an origin story as to why they feel like they have to wear the mask, or they do it to bring about a persona that detaches them from their true selves, allowing them to commit horrible acts to others.”

I believe the masks we don in hopes of hiding our internal issues are very similar. They help us detach from our true selves and appear normal to everyone else. The truth of the matter is everyone else is wearing their own masks, hiding their own issues and problems. These masks give us a false sense of connection.

Novelist André Berthiaume said, “We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.”

I learned the hard way that removing my mask was painful, but I truly believe the best thing I ever did for my depression was to stop hiding it. I made social media posts going into detail about my struggles. I spoke to family and friends about it. It’s painful to admit mental illness, but no longer hiding it removed quite a bit of the darkness for me.

And creating the open dialogue about it made me realize I was certainly not alone. So many of my friends, colleagues, and family members began telling me about their own struggles and masks. All this time I’d thought it was just me.

As a society, we are doing our young men a disservice by allowing them to go through life thinking they are weak or abnormal or less masculine because they have struggles and feelings no one else has—forcing them into smiling masks. Instead, we should teach everyone about depression and how it works. A few years ago, as a disabled veteran, I went to the VA hospital for help with my struggles, and I learned quite a bit about myself and my depression.

I learned that my depression can be triggered by wonderful events in my life. Big events, whether good or bad, can be the trigger. Now, it’s not about the events . . . it’s about how my body and mind react to the events.

When I won the Bram Stoker Award in 2010, I came home and suffered the worst bout of my life. Everything was wonderful. I had a new baby girl, a perfect marriage, no financial issues, and I’d just won an international book award . . . and I thought I was going to die.

Thankfully, the folks at the VA explained that big events, good or bad, are like eating a candy bar and getting the sugar rush . . . and then comes the crash. The candy bar was delicious, and I loved consuming it, but it triggered a response in my body I did not expect. Our brains can’t always distinguish the difference between good and bad regarding the emotional spike we experience. And the reflection in the mirror doesn’t reveal what’s happening inside our brains. Our success can mask the chemicals causing very real problems.

Depression can’t be cured by “snapping out of it” or “getting out of the house” or “thinking of all the good things in your life.” It’s a chemical issue. It’s not an emotional issue. And although emotional spikes can trigger it, depression is a physical ailment no different than cancer or diabetes. It’s a chemical reaction in the physical body.

You would never tell someone with cancer that it is “all just in your head” or that they needed to “go outside more and get sunshine.” You would never tell a diabetic to “think happy thoughts” or to “count your blessings.” Depression is just as much of a physical disease as any other. And when we start thinking of it this way, we can find better ways of managing rather than masking it. At least I have.

I find it interesting how the masks we wear with depression, compared to the Hollywood killer masks, are inverted. Think about it: The movie killers wore masks that instilled fear. And the masks we wear are there because we fear those around us will avoid or abandon us when they see what we hide from them.

But I found that those who truly love us are not horrified by what they find behind the masks. What really horrifies them is the realization that we felt we had to wear those masks to survive all along.

I’m not going to lie to you by saying I no longer experience depression. I still have occasional bouts, but I’m happy to report that the skin that was damaged from removing my mask is finally starting to heal.