Evangeline Lilly has been dealing with a "profound pain".
The 40-year-old actress took to Instagram to reveal to her fans that she had a "rough year" last year but didn’t want to burden her followers with her "trauma".
However, she now feels ready to open up about her struggles as she finally believes she is "coming out of that deep place".
Evangeline wrote on Instagram: "I had such a rough year last year but I didn’t want to share all of it with you because I didn’t want to be a dark cloud in your world. All I’ve ever wanted to do was put joy in the world. To add sunshine. I didn’t want you to be having a perfectly good day and then have my post make you sad. But I struggle deeply with feeling that all I ever am is what I feel everyone else wants and needs me to be. I often feel alone and unseen. .
"I have always known I was strong. Strong enough, I believed, to hold all my pain and everyone else’s also. So I kept it all inside, kept it to myself, and made space in there to hold your pain, too. Publicly, I hid and made light of my deepest traumas and laughed in the face of my most profound pain. .
"Until, last year, I broke. Suddenly I was forced to face my weakness and my limitations, my trauma and fears. I was left with no choice but to accept that I am limited or…carry on down a road of perfectionist denial that would inevitably kill me. .
"I am coming out of that deep place, slowly. As I start to breathe the fresh air, as I start to find my new, limited footing, I feel disconnected from you. I feel it’s pointless to share the light when you don’t know my darkness. I feel lost and apathetic about this space we share."
While Evangeline is now ready to go public with her struggles, she admitted she is unsure if her fans would have wanted her to talk about them while she was going through her issues.
She explained: "I ask myself…would you have wanted to come along in my darkness had I shared it?"