Was that the normal process of becoming a mom… or mental illness… or just sleep deprivation?
I find myself asking this a lot when I think about that first year with my daughter who is now two and a half.
Before I had postpartum depression or postnatal depression or perinatal mood disorder (or whatever you want to call it) I might have thought that the worst part of depression would be how it impacts mood and feelings. Not so. Or at least, that is not the most persistent challenge of it.
The strangest and most confusing part was the way it messed with my thoughts, my life philosophy, my perception of the truth.
I look back on that period of my life as a time I was transported into a different dystopian galaxy. Everything looked different. Everything felt different. I lived in survival mode, fighting to protect my child, filled with alertness and paranoia and dread for one or both of our imminent deaths. I remember some of my thoughts during that time, but can barely relate to who I was.
I have yet to find any book or resource written by professionals that captures my experience. If you research postpartum depression, you will find lists of symptoms, some of which I had and some which I did not have, stuff like excessive crying, feelings of hopelessness, panic, insomnia, unwanted thoughts.
While these lists are (I’m sure) clinically helpful and necessary, I also find them reductive and cold and simple. It’s one of those times where the language is far too literal- only symbolic language can come close to the truth.
Rather than asking myself, what were your symptoms? I find a questions that gets closer to the real struggle I faced was, what lies did you believe during that time? And what truths did you discover?
I know that mental illnesses of all kinds often involve distortion of the truth. People who are manic can truly believe they do not need sleep to survive. People with eating disorders who are dangerously underweight can actually believe they are overweight. People who are suicidal can believe that the people who love them will be better off without them. Mental illness can convince us that lies are truths.
Some of the lies I believed when I had PPD were: 1)I am dying. 2) It is very likely that my baby will just die any day. 3) Everyone is out to get me. 4) I’m a horrible mom/general human being.
However, in another sense, depression can actually get you in touch with the truth. There’s an interesting but controversial hypothesis called depressive realism. The hypothesis is that people with depression actually view the world more realistically than those without it. In other words, the world and human life truly are depressing, but healthy people are able to cling to a set of optimistic lies and delusions that help them cope.
I don’t know if this hypothesis is correct (I know I would like it to be incorrect) but I will say that some of the depressive thoughts I had are actually true . For example, here are some truths that I became obsessed with during that time:
1) We are all going to die some day. 2) Life is short. 3) Life is unfair. 4) Sometimes bad and tragic things happen to people and we don’t know why. 5) Life can change in an instant for the worse. 6) Even some of the best parts of life entail suffering. 7) We cannot fully prevent suffering; it is inevitable. 8) I am limited. Everything about my life is finite.
It is unnatural and unhealthy to become obsessed with thoughts like these, to dwell on them all the time, but they were true. They are true.
It’s what’s so confusing from the outside of mental illness. During that time, I believed some things that were not true. But some of the “truths” I came to live with were actually true, and still remain with me.
In fact, some of these truths were kind of… good for me… I think.
For example, there were things, whole categories of things, that I had always had such heavy self-defeating thoughts about. I could never do that. I’m not brave enough to do that. That’s just not my thing. During and after PPD, I found myself realizing that a lot of these beliefs were based on nothing. They were personal mythology and they were false.
There were also things that I had always thought I just didn’t want that I now found myself wanting. I almost related to people who had had near-death experiences, because even though I was not dying, I believed I was. I thought as a dying person would- looking back, what are my true regrets?
I looked back on my life and saw it completely differently. Rather than seeing a list of accomplishments, I saw a great deal of failure. I saw a person who really spent so much time and energy trying to please other people and impress other people and make everybody happy without actually hearing her own voice. This was very painful, but also, very transformative and helpful in the long run.
In the period where I was coming out of PPD, I became pretty fearless, except for the extreme concentrated fear I had around my daughter’s safety (which may never really go away, I think.) A lot of my other fears truly vanished. For example, I was pretty much cured of social anxiety. I never would have written personal things on the internet before PPD, knowing that some people may mock it or dislike it and now my attitude is, that’s okay. Who cares that someone will dislike what I write?
These are just a few small examples, and there was a whole spiritual dimension to it that I will write about another time.
A lot of my recovery involved sorting lies from truths. It was confusing. It’s still confusing.
Once I recovered, I was left with some questions.
Was my depressed brain sick and delusional, and now it’s healthy and seeing correctly again?
OR
Was my depressed brain understanding life for the first time, and recovering gave me back the protective illusions that helped me cope with life?
OR
Can both of these be partially true?
AND
What does it mean that so much truth was discovered in the lies, so many abilities were discovered in the brokenness, so much meaning found through the meaninglessness?
Light Up Moms 