Out the Other Side

The burden of leading can be heavy even in the best of times. Coupled with the depression that afflicts so many founders, it can overwhelm their soul ... or forge it into something stronger.

- By Michael Callahan. Photographs by Jordan Tiberio and Lindsay Wassell

BY 2016, Melissa Bernstein had built a multimillion-dollar company catering to the nostalgia of a generation of upscale parents who coveted and ponied up good money for designer old-school toys for their progeny. Over the course of three decades, she and her husband, Doug, had turned their Wilton, Connecticut-based business, Melissa & Doug, into a $550 million empire, the Tiffany of toys. A sunny, ebullient mother of six, she embodied the mythology of the woman who had it all.

Except it was all a lie.

Not the commercial success-that was most definitely not a lie. But the façade, her image as the Martha Stewart of playthings, was a meticulously constructed gingham suit of armor, meant to deflect any gaze into how Melissa Bernstein really felt inside: scared, paranoid, and unable to forge meaningful human connections, damaged, depressed, isolated, and alone. It's exhausting,” Bernstein says today, recalling sleepwalking through much of her life and career. “I understand now the reason most folks don't crash until midlife. Because in our teens and 20s, we shoulder it, right? We can bear the façade. We can pretend we're someone we're not, and we get through it. But as I started to get older, I started to hear-it was literally like a drumbeat: 'You aren't being true to yourself.”