Big Little Lies‘ second season wrapped up on Sunday night with the Monterey Five, led by Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz), seemingly walking into the police station to turn themselves in for the roles they played in Perry Wright’s death. We also got to see Celeste (Nicole Kidman) demolish Mary Louise (Meryl Streep) on the stand and retain custody of her children, Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) and Ed (Adam Scott) renew their wedding vows, Renata (Laura Dern) expertly destroy her husband’s model trains with a baseball bat, and Jane (Shailene Woodley) finally find some happiness with her surfer boyfriend.
Fans had mixed reactions to the finale—and the season as a whole—and took to social media to express both their delight and outrage. Now a new thread on Twitter, started by writer and Keep It! podcast host Ira Madison III, has people discussing alternate events that could have happened to the BLL gang. “Now that #BigLittleLies is over what were your favorite movements [sic] this season?” he wrote. “I’m torn between Mary Louise burying Bonnie alive for killing her son and Jane’s new aquarium boyfriend turning out to be an eco-terrorist who takes her and Ziggy hostage.”
People got seriously creative in the replies. There were references to HBO’s other hit show of the year, Game of Thrones. “When it was revealed Madeline’s daughter Chloe is the Three Eyed Raven I screamed,” one user suggested. Also, people brought up the recent college admissions scandal involving wealthy parents, like Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin, buying their kids’ way into university. “When Madeline and Abigail almost get caught up in the USC admissions scandal but Chloe blabs to her teacher and ruins it,” someone tweeted.
Here are some of our other favorites:
Perhaps this is enough fodder to convince HBO that they need to do a season three.
Chiseled face? Check. Abs? Double check. It’s no secret that Tyler Cameron, the hunky contractor from this season of The Bachelorette, is easy on the eyes, but what’s even better is that he has the personality to match. That one-two punch has made him a favorite among Bachelor Nation.
The 27-year-old has been taking to his Twitter account lately to fire off some amazing jokes, and let me tell you, this guy is funny. Like, actually funny. Like, “how is it possible that Hannah is even considering any other men this season” funny. Let’s recap some of Tyler Cameron‘s best work, shall we?
See, these kinds of quizzes aren’t just for the fans. While it’s hilarious on its own that he even took this quiz, it’s a double whammy that he ended up with Luke P. (Also, I definitely need to start using “Christmas treeing” as a phrase in my everyday life.)
Luke P. throwing bologna at Garrett may go down as one of the most ridiculous scenes in Bachelorette history, but Tyler’s tweet makes it that much better.
We really didn’t mind this look, but it’s nice to see that he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
Simple and to the point. A man of few words, but those words are gold.
It doesn’t take a body language expert to see what’s going on here.
It certainly would’ve made for good TV.
Pretty sure Tyler has also worn a few different shades this season as well….
Chicken nuggets may have gotten more air time this season than some of the actual contestants.
I mean, this is actually a fairly accurate representation.
Two glasses is all it takes.
I guess it’s now officially official: Tyler is basically perfect.
Stefanie Parker is a writer who runs the Bachelor-themed Instagram account She’s All Bach.
Now, as everyone eagerly anticipates the start of Sunday’s 80-minute finale, Twitter users are taking to the platform to offer some predictions about how the series will end. Sure, we might now know that Sansa Stark’s fate is going to make us feel all sorts of ways, but Game of Thrones fans are keeping things a little more light-hearted by offering up some really funny predictions.
“Game of Thrones ends with Jon Snow going full Cady Heron and just breaking off pieces of the iron throne to give out to everyone,” a fan predicted.
There was this meta theory: “Game of Thrones finale is gonna end with the screen going black, and then Tony Soprano snapping out of it and finishing his dinner.”
One fan just wants Tormund to live his best life: “The only satisfying conclusion to Game of Thrones is if it ends with a Tormund bottle episode, where he’s up north, just chilling and getting over Brienne, really starting to take care of himself.”
“The finale of Game of Thrones is just one hour of Daenerys trying to rebuild King’s Landing with ramen noodles and sandpaper,” another fan predicted.
Another user is looking out for the dragons: “Spoiler: The dragon gets into her dream college and everyone cheers.”
There’s this pretty ideal ending: “My GOT ending: Brienne and Sansa marry, jointly take the Iron Throne.”
“Game of Thrones ends with Bob Newhart waking up next to Suzanne Pleshette,” one user wrote. “‘Honey you won’t believe the dream I just had,’ he says, launching into a convoluted recollection of rape and dragons that ends with Suzanne asking for a divorce.”
One offered some deadpan British humor: “I reckon I know how Game Of Thrones finishes. It’s with the end credits and some music.”
And then there’s this voice of reason, who offers the most convincing theory of them all: “the writers creating the script for the finale knowing full well they about to fuck everyone up.”
Rachel Brosnahan is hungry. “I usually have Nutella in my purse,” she says, after taking her seat at Boxwood, a restaurant nestled in the London West Hollywood Hotel. “I had Smarties in there too. I took all the condiments from the hotel in France when we were shooting Maisel—all the honeys and jams. I really love condiments.”
Maisel, of course, is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the Amazon original series for which Brosnahan, 27, took home the 2018 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Series—Musical or Comedy.
“I can already see the headline of this story,” she says. “‘My Love Affair With Condiments.’”
For the past few weeks, Brosnahan—a Milwaukee native—has been in Paris shooting the second season of Maisel, a show that’s been called “a love letter to stand-up comedy, female empowerment, and New York City,” by The Hollywood Reporter and about which New York magazine asked “Can We Talk About How Charming The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Is?” The unofficial consensus among critics and fans is that the show—much like Mad Men and Good Girls Revolt—can be added to the canon of period pieces that possess an uncanny resonance.
The series, written by Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, follows Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel, a full-skirted domestic 1958 Jewish princess from the Upper West Side for whom perfection—or at least its patina—is a nonnegotiable. Midge waits until her husband falls asleep to remove her makeup and sets her alarm for dawn to reapply before he wakes up; she uses measuring tape to meticulously track and jot down the size of her ankles, calves, and thighs; and she finally—finally—gets the rabbi to come to her Yom Kippur breakfast, a worthy accomplishment for any good Jewish housewife.
By the end of the pilot, things take a turn: Midge’s mousy husband, Joel, leaves her for his secretary, but instead of getting a desk job or finding a richer husband, Midge semi-accidentally starts to test her voice at open mics nights in East Village underground comedy clubs, a fruitless passion of her husband’s. But she is good. Really good.
It’s a testament to Brosnahan that most people who watch Maisel assume she’s done stand-up or that it’s ignited an interest in doing so—she nails the loose-canon countenance that comes with amateur open mics and, later, the all-business confidence of holding an audience captive.
“The truth is no and no,” she says when I ask if she has experience with stand-up or aspirations toward it. “It’s a slightly different technical skill set—one that I’ve never really worked on and one that doesn’t always come naturally to me.”
“I’ve lost many jobs because people would say, ‘We really liked her, but she’s just not funny.’”
Based on Brosnahan’s past roles—namely as call girl Rachel Posner in House of Cards—for which she received an Emmy nomination as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series—and the wife of a scientist developing the atomic bomb in short-lived WGN America drama Manhattan, even Sherman-Palladino wasn’t sure she’d be the right person to play Midge, a character whose primary motivation is to prove to everyone around her that a housewife can be funny.
“I had a casting director [in Los Angeles who] called me up and said, ‘I know there’s literally nothing on this girl’s resum´e that will tell you she can do the part, but I feel like it’s Rachel,’” Sherman-Palladino says. “You look at her [work], and it’s either drama or half the time she’s being tied to a post or thrown in a box or shoved in the back of a van. All very dramatic.”
Brosnahan agrees. “I’m laughing [at the fact that] I’m now an award-winning comedic actress,” she says. “Like, that feels absurd! I spent most of my life being told I wasn’t funny. I’ve lost many jobs because people would say, ‘We really liked her, but she’s just not funny.’”
Still, Brosnahan didn’t take that feedback personally. “It happened enough times that there was a pattern,” she explains. “I thought, Maybe I should listen to it. Now I’ve realized you can continue to learn things, even when you’ve formed a really solid sense of self.”
Her Maisel costar Alex Borstein, who plays Midge’s tough-as-nails manager at the comedy club, views Brosnahan’s background in drama as an asset. “She’s honest and vulnerable, and that’s what I think it takes to be a really good comedic presence,” Borstein says. “She’s got a tough sensibility—and some darkness in her. Having sarcasm and having that dark comedic sense usually comes from being an underdog or having some pain. It’s a muscle.”
Sherman-Palladino wanted whoever played Midge to be “infinitely watchable,” someone “you weren’t going to get tired of staring at after, like, five minutes.” Plus, she had to be the kind of actress who could click with the very specific rhythm and rat-a-tat pattern of Sherman-Palladino’s dialogue—a stylistic signature of all her scripts. To that end, every woman who came in to audition was required to deliver three key scenes from the pilot: the speech Midge gives at her wedding, the breakup with her husband, and the character’s first stand-up set.
Brosnahan nailed all three. “A lot of really talented, wonderful actresses came in for it—great girls that I hope to work with someday,” Sherman-Palladino says. “But Rachel…she knew these scenes inside and out. By the time she walked out the door, we were like, ‘Well, that’s our girl.’”
Dinnertime. Brosnahan zeroes in on the cheeseburger and, instead of the restaurant’s house-made chips, asks for fries. She’s especially excited to see her favorite ketchup—Sir Kensington’s—is provided. “They had a truck where you could sample their condiments outside of the Frances Valentine offices in New York,” she says. (Frances Valentine is an accessories brand designed by Kate Spade, Brosnahan’s aunt.) “I have a love affair [with Sir Kensington’s ], if I’m being honest.”
Over the course of our meal, Brosnahan’s culinary passion comes up several times. She tells me about her trips with Michael Zegen, who plays Midge’s ex-husband Joel, to an “oyster ramen cocktail bar” in Manhattan’s Hamilton Heights and the time she learned how to make artichoke pizza with Rachael Ray. Her best friend, Karlee Fomalont, cites the Dave & Buster’s and Shake Shack in Times Square as go-to spots for them when I later ask her about Brosnahan.
But there’s one story, about an encounter earlier this year, that makes Brosnahan “infuriated.” She was at an influencer event for Maisel, held at a Los Angeles Jewish deli, and helping herself to fries and latkes when a man came up to her and asked, “Are you sure you want to eat that? Don’t you have a dress to fit into?”
“It wasn’t the first comment this guy had made,” Brosnahan says. “He kept asking about my personal life and my relationship status, but in a really aggressive way—as if that was the only thing of value about me. He said things like, ‘You must have a man.’” Brosnahan reminded him that the event was about her work on Maisel, not her private life, but he continued to push. The comment about her body was the breaking point. “I was shoveling a latke in my face—and very thrilled about it, mind you—when he made the food comment,” she explains. “I said, ‘I am sure I want to eat that. I love latkes! Do you want one?’ I was trying to keep it light, but I would have loved to have had a great Amy Sherman-Palladino—style clapback. It’s only in hindsight that you think of these things.”
Brosnahan had the man booted from the event. “The guy was a jackass. It was so gross, particularly in a room centered around this show. It’s sad that this behavior still exists.”
During the past few months, Brosnahan has become acutely aware that her life—the one before the hit show, before the awards, before burgers with reporters in hotels—is different. She doesn’t feel famous, but there are times, like the latke incident, when she knows she’s under scrutiny. People know how to say her last name now. Doors are opening with opportunities. Living in New York allows her to still have some anonymity, but even that’s changing.
“I didn’t realize how much I was used to and valued utter anonymity,” she says. “Not that I need to be polished, but now I wouldn’t probably go to the grocery store in Midtown with zit cream on my face.” She laughs, because she’s done it before. Recently, during a breakout, Brosnahan put some “pink stuff” on her acne and went to her local dog park. “I thought, I’m not going to see anyone I know,” she says. Of course, as soon as she got there somebody asked, “Are you….?” Brosnahan panicked and said no.
“I don’t know why I was embarrassed. People have zits, and they put shit on them. But I was mortified. I felt so uncomfortable being a perfectly normal human being,” she says. “Why are we embarrassed when that happens? Everyone does that, whether in private or in public. I get mad when I get embarrassed about stuff like that.”
It was Miley Cyrus, funnily enough, who shared a similar story with Brosnahan at a press event that reminded her to keep things in perspective. “I hope I don’t butcher her words, but when she had a zit and wanted to put pink cream on it, she did, regardless of where she was. She felt it was important to show her young and impressionable audience that it was OK, and there’s nothing shameful about it. I found that really inspiring.”
Brosnahan has found one way to make this whole fame thing work for her: by bringing awareness to her passion projects, organizations like Global Citizen and Covenant House. “There’s a responsibility that comes with this increased platform,” she says. “None of us should be silent right now, but we also need to listen.”
When asked how she’d describe herself, Brosnahan chooses words like curious,ambitious, and open. It’s surprising, given that questions about her romantic life are off-limits. “I like to keep my private life private,” she says, without hesitation. “Maybe that will change, I don’t know, but I am blessed with a really rich personal life, so it feels important for my sanity to keep it separate.”
She didn’t expect to be so guarded—“I never would have considered myself that way”—but the more attention she got, the more she realized she was deeply uncomfortable sharing that side of herself.
“I’ve worked really hard to get here, but I’m also really lucky. Nothing happens without some stars aligning.”
Fomalont also describes Brosnahan as open, though only with the people she’s close to. “It’s a balance I respect so much,” she says. “Because the impulse is to overshare, but then you lose the things that keep you grounded. She’s able to stay grounded and rooted because of the personal stuff she keeps tied to her heart, but she is engaged. It’s a delicate dance.”
Part of it is that Brosnahan likes disappearing into characters, and it can be hard for an audience to separate the art from the artist. “The most exciting thing that anyone ever says to me about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is that they didn’t realize that it was the same actress from House of Cards,” she says. “To me, that’s all I want.”
When the waitress approaches, asking if we’d like to see a dessert menu, Brosnahan is ready: “Yeah, of course.” The chocolate fondue—with fruit and a macaroon and ice-cream sandwich—stands out. (“If nothing else, the presentation alone is probably amazing. These guys really know how to throw a party.”)
While we wait, conversation turns to the Golden Globes and the moment Carol Burnett and Jennifer Aniston presented Brosnahan with her Best Actress award. “Annie was one of my favorite movies ever,” she says. “So [when I saw Burnett], I died. I’m pretty sure I went blank as I approached the stage.” As for Aniston, Brosnahan hadn’t watched Friends until two years ago. Now she’s seen every episode. “I love Ross so much! And Monica. I really enjoy the Geller siblings. I feel like I related to them the most because of their anxiety.”
That anxiety, Brosnahan says, never entirely goes away—even after winning a Golden Globe. “When we were shooting Maisel in Paris, I thought, I’ve got this. Then I got up there and was just as nervous as I was during the first season, equally horrified every single second. I was like, Shit, it never goes away.”
When dessert arrives, the spread looks like something Midge herself would have prepared for a dinner party. Each piece of fruit and cake is divided into perfect squares, like a delicious chess board. Before we ruin the illusion, I ask one last thing: “Much like the presentation of our meal, have the last six months been as amazing as it looks from my perspective?”
“There’s an element of fantasy—the fantasy of what this life looks like,” Brosnahan says. “I feel like I have one foot on either side of the fence, you know? I’m in a position where things are cool, but it’s all new. I still feel like a super-normal human being. I’ve worked really hard to get here, but I’m also really lucky. Nothing happens without some stars aligning.”
Hair by Ted Gibson at the Visionaries Agency. Manicure by Yukie Miyakawa at Kate Ryan Inc. Set design by Alex Brannian at Art Department. Makeup by Lisa Aharon for Chanel.
We live in a time when “resting bitch face” is a joke, selfies are constant, and activist art implores us to stop telling women to smile: We’re as aware of our faces as ever. But the conversation still largely excludes people who don’t always have control of theirs: people with a flattened affect.
In psychology, the word “affect” refers to someone’s variability in facial expression, pitch of voice, and the use of hand and body movements, according to a University of Washington Department of Psychiatry glossary. A person’s affect can be “broad” (which is the norm), “restricted” or “blunted” (which both mean pared back in some way) or “flat”: lacking signs of affective expression, or having a monotonous voice and unmoving face.
Think about the time you’ve wasted wondering if you made an awkward face when trying to remember if you knew that person you ran into on the street, or if you scrunched your eyebrows too much in that job interview. For people with flat affect, emotional expression is limited, reduced or nonexistent. This isn’t an illness or a disorder in its own right, but a possible symptom of many brain conditions, such as depression, Parkinson’s disease, autism, traumatic brain injury and schizophrenia, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMV).
Flat affect is the face of lethargy and voice of apathy: no eye rolling, no winking, no smirking. “The rise of ‘Resting Bitch Face’ is kind of a step in the right direction,” says 30-year-old Kaille Kirkham, who says she was diagnosed with depression at age nine, and experiences a flattened affect. “Because it explains, no, my face doesn’t match with my feelings—don’t assume it does.”
Kirkham explains it like this: “You’re constantly expending energy trying to either display emotions you don’t feel, or explain yourself to people who perceive your expression negatively.” For her, her expressiveness dims when her depression is at its worst. Though experts are mixed on whether depression on its own leads to a flat affect, Kirkham describes a lack of connection to her emotions that she says reads across her face. “I’m mostly just exhausted at that point and have a hard time caring about anything, including how others perceive me.”
At the University of the Southwest in New Mexico, where Kirkham received her Master’s in counseling, she came across a description of flat affect in a textbook, and she saw herself.
“I immediately recognized it,” she wrote in an email to Glamour from Tokyo where she now lives and works as an English instructor. “I’ve been masking my emotions in public settings since I was very young.” She says she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 19, and before that her childhood was tough; her parents chose to homeschool her to protect her from the “emotional ringer” she was put through at school. “Mental illness runs through both sides of my family, so even though at six I couldn’t articulate my depression and anxiety, my father recognized it.” Maybe he saw it on her face.
Wakilah Majied, 35, who experiences flat affect as a symptom of schizophrenia. She says she sometimes forces herself to smile to make sure she’s appearing friendly. “I do my best to give that same energy back to someone, but it doesn’t always come across the way that it’s supposed to.”
Jeffrey Lieberman, M.D., professor and chair of psychiatry at Columbia University, said that flat affect exists on a spectrum of severity, and most who experience it, don’t even know they have it. “[Flat affect] can create a dissonance in terms of how you think you’re making your way through the world and navigating day-to-day activities and what’s really happened. You’re getting a reaction from people that doesn’t align with your own self-image.” And that experience can be tough. “Expression of emotion is an integral component of personal well-being; if someone’s emotionality is unusual in some way, that’s potentially consequential. Just like if you had asthma and you suddenly couldn’t exercise—it limits you.”
Let’s say your co-worker, in a single conversation, shares both good and bad news: she got a promotion and her dog died. Your face would react without you having to say a word: your eyes opening in celebration; or the soft exhalation of a breath, as your mouth turns down to show empathy. For someone with a flat affect, their mouth may remain a straight line, or their tone of voice unchanged. It’s like a dial tone instead of a greeting.
Having a school textbook put a name to symptoms like this is an experience Kirkham shares with Wakilah Majied, 35, who came across the definition of flat affect last year in an abnormal psychology course at community college. The New Orleans-based substitute teacher says she thought, “Wow, I have this. This has to be what I experience.”
Majied’s flat affect was a symptom of her schizophrenia, a diagnosis she says she received at 28. She sees a psychiatrist about once a month to discuss how she is, and to titrate her medication, but says visits are short; her face hadn’t come up. But when she read the description—“still faces that show less anger, joy, and other feelings than most people”—the words on the page seemed to bridge a bewildering chasm between how she felt and how she knew she came across to others.
“I don’t want to give off that reaction as if I’m not welcoming, that I’m not friendly,” Majied says. But, throughout her life, she has heard that she gives that impression. As a teenager, she says her classmates and teachers told her she looked sad. Her own sister once said she noticed her appearing robotic, a blunt version of her former self. At her first job out of college, she was introduced to a co-worker’s friend, and said she was happy to see her social life beginning to develop, only to later hear that the friend thought Mejied “didn’t like her.” In an email to Glamour, Mejied wrote that these comments made her think, “it must be something going on with my facial expressions and body language.”
Mejied describes a disconnect that flat affect can create between the emotions someone feels (excitement to meet a new friend, for example) and the emotions they are able to express (such as with a heightened tone of voice, engaging eye contact or a warm expression). A study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry found that flat affect is common but not omnipresent in people with schizophrenia and depression, but some people with flat affect can move through life completely blunted.
An expressionless face might seem like no biggie when you consider the severity of delusions that people with schizophrenia can also experience (Majied said she endured terrifying visual hallucinations in her twenties, including seeing strange men on her wall and hearing voices). Not so, says Bethany Yeiser, 36, founding president of CURESZ Foundation (Comprehensive Understanding via Research and Education into Schizophrenia). “Flat affect is a devastating symptom. You might think, ‘Oh well, you’re just not quite interested. You’re a little aloof.’ But for me, that’s not what it was. The biggest thing I found with flattened affect is relationship problems. I loved my mom, but I just couldn’t express that love.”
Bethany Yeiser, 36, founded the CURESZ Foundation to spread awareness of schizophrenia. She experienced flat affect as a side effect of medication, a blank stare forming hours after she took a pill.
Yeiser was 20 years old and studying at the University of Southern California when she started to experience negative symptoms of schizophrenia, including flat affect. “I didn’t know that I had it, but looking back, my parents remember seeing me during an online phone call. They said my face was just like a rock,” she told Glamour over Skype.
Dr. Lieberman says that flat affect is just one behavioral symptom that occurs in a constellation of features of different illnesses, and they aren’t all psychiatric. It also shows up in developmental disorders such as autism, and degenerative ones including parkinson’s.
“We may disregard someone with facial masking because their facial expressions, or lack thereof, go against our social expectations. Also, it can be difficult to trust verbal communication when the facial expression doesn’t match the sentiment,” a daughter wrote in a blog post about her father’s Parkinson’s and the flat affect (or “facial masking” he experiences as a result).
As if literal communication hurdles weren’t challenging enough for people experiencing this, “flat affect” is also being tossed around online as an insult. A search on Twitter delivers pro-gun activists claiming Parkland survivor David Hogg has a flat affect, as well as critics speculating that Sarah Huckabee Sanders has it. Of course, these mentions are politically loaded and mired in the stigma that surrounds mental illness, but they do raise an important point: people can appear flat, either intentionally (say, when speaking about emotionally charged topics in the public eye) or as a feature of their personality (a tendency toward seriousness, for example).
Another painful reality is medical treatment that itself comes with flat affect as a side effect. A paper published in International Journal of Bipolar Disorders concluded that antidepressants such as SSRIs can cause emotional blunting and so can antipsychotics, according to a study by the Department of Psychiatry at Stellenbosch University and published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Bethany Yeiser experienced this. Her mother, Karen Yeiser, a nurse and author of Flight From Reason, a memoir about her daughter’s mental illness and recovery, told Glamour that within hours of Bethany taking one drug for her schizophrenia, a blank stare started to form on her face. “When she was at her sickest, with untreated schizophrenia, she was actually more animated and full of expression, much more than when she went on medication that had the side effect of flat affect.” That’s just the price you pay, she adds: “Sometimes you have to tolerate certain side effects in order to get medicine that saves your life.”
But Yeiser did end up switching medications. In an email to Glamour, Karen Yeiser wrote, “Recovery was like watching her personality slowly emerge from within a dense cloud and into the light of the sun.” Dr. Lieberman confirmed that the reversal of flat affect could indicate a “measure of the efficacy of treatment.” Yeiser went back to school to earn her B.S. in molecular biology and went on to write the memoir Mind Estranged: My Journey from Schizophrenia and Homelessness to Recovery.
Others are still the journey to finding a medication that fits, and a way to move through life with this symptom. Mejied says, “I have to pay attention to my reactions to the different medications. I don’t want my behavior to change, with regards to how I’m interacting with my family and the outside world. I worry about that.” To combat her fears about how others perceive her, she says she sometimes forces herself to form facial expressions by reminding herself to try to smile back when someone smiles at her: a gesture that comes so naturally to most. “I do my best to give that same energy back to someone, but it doesn’t always come across the way that it’s supposed to.”
Kirkham says it comes down to acting, which she took classes for as a kid and now does constantly—offstage. “When I’m not depressed or manic, I’m generally a bubbly, positive, and funny person. When I’m dealing with a flat affect, I have to keep that up, both to maintain the quality of my lessons, and so that nobody catches on.” And that’s no easy feat.
“It’s absolutely exhausting to pretend I feel something when I don’t, because I’m constantly thinking about smiling, laughing, keeping my voice energetic and chirpy—it’s acting, but for eight to nine hours a day. When I finish, it’s almost a relief to let it all just slide off my face and be flat.”
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