There are one million ways people pretend. Ways people turn away from who they truly are, and from seeing what they are truly made of. People construct personas that are cardboard cut outs of Who We Wanna Be, the Fake-it-til-Ya-Make-It-Selves, and then spend their whole lives trying to live in them.

How do I know? Because I was once a pro at it. I started pretending when I was a little girl.

I am age eight. I am sitting in the lobby at my ballet school, The Ruth Mitchell Dance Studio, pretending not to be distraught. My mom is an hour and a half late to pick me up. Each minute that goes by without seeing her black Honda Accord pull up heats up my insides, as if I were a tiny copper tea kettle on a stovetop nearing boil. I hold my breath, hoping I will become invisible, and that the boiling will stop. The receptionist with the short silver hair looks at the clock at then at me. I can tell she is about to say something, so I pretend I am reading my social studies homework. But in the last hour and a half I have already done all my homework. I am eight. We don't have all that much homework.

Eventually she says: "We close soon. Are you sure she's coming? Do you need to call another family member or a neighbor?"

Our neighbors are not people we speak to much except to wave at from our driveway. And as far as family goes, my Uncle Chuck has rescued us enough times, and I know better than to call him at dinner time. It's just me and Mama. So, I smile and laugh, pretending to be a fun, carefree child instead of the child with the boiling insides, and say: "Yes, she is coming, she's on a big important project at work, and driving in from the city. She'll be here soon!"

I hold my breath to keep the inside of me from boiling over into the room as visible feelings, look down at the map of the colonial South in my textbook, pretending to study it, even though it's too dark to see now in this room. The sun has set. My insides are crumbling. This becomes my routine. It's what must happen so I can study dance, and so I learn how to sit with the heat and hold my breath in just a way so I can't feel anything.

I started pretending before that though.

I am six years old. I am in Miami with my father who I only see twice a year. We are in his BMW. He wears a Rolex, and I am wearing hand-me-down Land's End jeans from my cousin Ginny and fake Teva’s from Wal-Mart that I am secretly ashamed of. I pretend not to notice my dad's tall orange 16 oz. plastic cup filled with Johnny Walker Red, ice, and water, sloshing by his stick shift. He uses a cup that is from my mom's alma mater: Randolph Macon Women's College. Though they are divorced, he will stay married to this cup for the next twenty years. It doesn't fit in the cup holder and is perched on the smooth beige leather by the stick shift. My eyes stay on the cup. I know it's his third one. My insides are getting hot again . I am not sure if it's because I know that with any fast turn, I may get showered with ice cold whiskey, or because I can tell he is loose in a way that scares me now. I pretend I am not scared to be in the car with him. Year after year, same routine. When he has had three, he goes far away. I know not to disturb him there. With one, he is fun. With two, he loves you. With three, let him be. So I sit quiet and I focus on holding my breath, so as to not let the fear swallow me whole.

How many little girls get so good at pretending that they decide they want to be an actress?

I did. At age eight I auditioned for the role of Anne Frank. I didn't get it, but I loved pouring myself into her pain. When I read her diary, I came alive. My soul screamed: "Me too! I know what it's like to feel trapped and yearn to be free." Only I was trapped inside my body, and she, in an attic.

I also pretended as a ballerina quite well. I danced in the Nutcracker as the Chinese "Tea" on hard pointe shoes, with chopsticks in my hair and a big smile. This time I held my breath so I didn't feel the pain when my toes bled, while secretly enjoying seeing the blood when I took off my shoes. Pain that could come out somewhere where no one could see felt safe and cathartic.

I found out at age 13 that cigarettes helped me pretend and helped me not have to feel. I pretended I wasn't a smoker most of my life. Tobacco kept the pain, and the love, at bay because I didn't trust either of those things. It formed a barrier between me and all the feelings. When I smoked, I could detach. I could rest finally. Puffs of smoke kept me safe by making a bubble around me. I looked like a cool girl, but she was a cover up for the truth: that I was a sad lonely girl pretending to be cool. Underneath the cool surface, my insides were still boiling, and under them I felt unloved and afraid.

I also pretended I was thin for a very long time. At my height being thin is required. 5'2 and a half with a full body and ample thighs and a belly like a full moon just wasn't allowed, said the unspoken rules in my protestant, white, middle-class world. So, I pretended I was skinny with packets of brown laxatives, smaller than an M & M, that left a sweet taste before you swallowed. And I spent nights half asleep on the bathroom floor waiting for the cramps to begin and for my insides to spew out so I could feel relief and pain safely while I was alone. And then I spent days staying hungry without telling a soul.

Starting when I was about ten, my dad warned me that fat women were not desirable and so I pretended to not be hungry in front of him, ever. And if I slipped and stopped pretending and let myself really eat, then he would notice and say: "Be careful. You will get fat." Which meant: "Be careful. You will not be loved." And since I didn't feel loved already, the prospect of feeling even more unloved was scary enough for me to keep pretending I was not hungry until I was about 28.

Going to school for art and theatre and writing was my savior. That is where I learned to feel and breathe again.

I am eighteen now. I am in New York at NYU standing in front of the class in an acting studio on the second floor on 21st and Broadway. It's an area of town where you find wholesale goods made in China pouring out of tiny shops, like strange wind-up toys that float in the tub, and colored beanies, and knock off aviator sunglasses. I am standing in front of the class, with my long curly hair with blondish highlights and brown roots that betray me. Stephanie, my wiry spritely teacher, studies the way I breathe. Breathing in front of a room of students staring at me feels like torture. I try and do it, though. I am paying a lot of money to attend this school. I. Not my parents. I. She watches me breathe and says:

"You are an inward breather. We cannot see or feel you breathing. You are breathing inside yourself. Your belly and chest never move. You must start breathing into your belly if you want to deeply feel."

I am stunned. How on Earth could she possibly know this? See this? How on Earth has she discovered my whole coping strategy for life and then told the whole class? I hold my breath even more in that moment, trying to appear calm and not completely exposed.

I tell her it is because I was a ballerina from age four to fourteen and had to hold my belly in. But I know the truth. I have been practicing not breathing and becoming invisible and not feeling since I was little. I am very good at it. And she is telling me now that I must stop. Which is terrifying.

Over time Stephanie and my other teachers teach me to breathe, and in turn feel. I am mortified at first. But I do it. With breathing comes embarrassment, tears, and rage, and I pour them into my acting and writing. That way no one can notice how much pain there is. I give them a new home fast, acting as complex characters in Shakespeare and Brecht, shaking my body madly in experimental performance art, writing plays about what I care about, and taking self portraits on 35 mm film as different goddesses and archetypes.

One day I am in line for the bathroom at my acting studio, behind a woman who has bothered me from day one. She has hairy armpits and wears torn sweatpants and sits on the floor instead of using a chair and she is loud and looks feral. Her freedom and confidence scare me.

She is rubbing her belly. She turns to me and says: "I am so constipated."

When she speaks these words the air shatters around me. I have been constipated since I was five when my parents split and my mom and I moved far from my father, and safety and security shattered for me, and my dad became mean and cold, and we became poor and needy. I learned to hold in my breath, and rage, and grief. And now, in line for the bathroom, under fluorescent lights, this woman is speaking my truth out loud.

I open my mouth and hear the words...

"Me too."

A warmth floods between us. A kinship. We are not alone! We are both women trying not to pretend and yet our bowels betray us. Our bowels say: "I am full of things I cannot release. Things I have held in. Things I am afraid of. Ways I have pretended." We speak of our favorite ways to unclog our bowels, from enemas to psyllium husks to Smooth Move teas, and there in that bathroom line we find a friend in one another. I have been a slave to perfection, and thinness, and holding it all together and in, and I can tell she has begun to escape this malady; she seems a few steps ahead of me, and so I can breathe around her.

Nearly twenty years later she is still one of my very best friends.

Pretending was like a virus that would go latent at times, and I would think it was gone, feeling free for a few months or years where I wasn't pretending. But then it would show up again out of nowhere in my loving, in my sexing, in my relationship to my body, and right smack dab between me and God.

I found yoga and meditation when I was 19 and I found I could sidestep my pain with these practices that were trending in New York City in 2003. I found a deep calm and more breath when I was moving my body at the yoga class at the community center on Avenue C on Tuesday nights, while Paz, the Jewish male teacher with dreads, adjusted my posture and taught me the Nadi Suddhi breath. Yoga asked me to breathe the pain away gently, and be ego-less and clean and holy, a bit like my childhood Christian values, but this time with incense and a bow that said "The Divine in me honors the Divine in you."

I found refuge there. Behind those practices I neatly tucked my feelings, until one day when someone saw me hiding there.

I am twenty now. I am standing in front of a room of fellow students at school and my teacher Deborah is staring at me. She is tall and mighty, with wispy blond hair, Swedish clogs, and many large rings on all her fingers. She oozes sex and power and strength in a way that terrifies and inspires me. I have just performed something in front of the class called a "private moment" in which I am to pull down all my proverbial masks, stop acting, stop pretending and be deeply revealed in front of the class. She looks me in the eye. Something about her gaze tells me I didn't do it right.

"Stop hiding behind your spirituality. I don't buy it," she says. "Who are you beneath all that?"

My lip begins to tremble.

"Yes," she says. "That's it, stay with that."

In front of the room, I crumble. I am exhausted from all the pretending. My exhaustion comes as heaves and screams and my hands beating against the wooden floor of the studio. For five minutes I let them all see who I am when I am not pretending. And when my time is up, I walk quietly back to my seat, feeling scared, naked, exposed, humiliated, and like I am going to vomit. How dare anyone find me pretending in my spiritual life?! No one was supposed to find me there. I stop breathing so I can stop feeling all that for the rest of the school day and run home as fast as I can after class so I can let it out in the privacy of my own home.

Somehow, I know this is important. I've been holding it all in for so long and there's an opening now and I must take it. So I go home, and I lay in my dark lofted bed in the apartment on 13th Street and Avenue B where the mice scurry on the floor pretending they don't see me crying in the dark. I breathe. I cry like I have never cried before. I am so angry at her for unraveling me, exposing me. I am so angry at my own incessant pretending, which has been hiding my broken heart, my "I am not okay," and the scared little girl I abandoned those years back by stifling her breath. But besides being angry and heart broken, I am also feeling something new. I am starting to feel space in my chest where there were once knots. I am feeling tingling where there was once numbness. I am feeling warmth in my belly that says "Yes, that is it my Love!" And I am feeling something I've only felt a few times: I am feeling free.

This was the beginning of something for me.

A glimmer of my own truth crystalizing in my body and coming out of hiding.

A start to a journey that would be lifelong.

A nod to a calling: to devote myself to the art of feeling, to express the pain and beauty in my heart as art no matter what; to not pretend as a defense; to love my body even though it is sometimes difficult; to breathe deep always; and to speak and write about it. All of it.

These days when I catch myself pretending, I know because something feels off. It is usually in the space of social niceties, where I catch myself with a fake smile. Or I catch myself saying "yes" to too many things when I want to say "no." Or I go along with what my partner wants because I want to please him. Because I want him to keep loving me. When this happens, I feel a twinge of something in my gut that says: "You are off your center. This is not your truth."

I've learned that this feeling is important and that I must listen to it. It's a clench in my belly where my breath goes shallow and I lose sight of myself for a moment. When I feel this, it is like a part of me is waving saying: "I need your help!" So, I take a simple pause, stop what I am doing, take a deep breath, feel, and get curious. I ask...Where am I pretending? Where did I just abandon my truth? When I can see it, which may take a sec, then I feel into what is under the pretending, even if it is uncomfortable: Am I scared I won't be loved if I am honest? Am I angry? Am I tired and ready to go home? Am I withholding a deep desire that I am ashamed of? I feel into the inquiry of what TRUTH is under my pretending.

And then I hold my Pretending Self close and tell her I love her, and that I've got her, and I remind her that we don't need to do that anymore.

When we pretend, we sacrifice our true selves. We leave a part of ourselves behind. We abandon our truth on behalf of others because we are ashamed, or afraid we will lose something if we reveal our deepest selves. But in this process, we forfeit discovering who we really are. We stay in the safe zone and don't widen and deepen as embodied souls. We stay small. When we commit instead to the messy and real revelation of our truth, we expand. We break down walls in our loving. We put down ideas of who we thought we were. We feel powerful and close to our own blood and guts. Here in the wide-open messy realness, we find home, which was in us all along.

RIPE FRUIT

To Be A Woman Who Doesn't Pretend