144: What if you suffered from postpartum depression?
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All those thoughts were going through my head. Like, you're worthless. You're a loser. You're a failure. You failed. You failed. You can't be happy. You can't feel love. And that's what the first six weeks were, were just this feeling of profound failure. Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation. A presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 144. What if you suffered from postpartum depression?

This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. I grew up in an upper-middle-class household. It was a great childhood. I have absolutely no complaints, and I'm really fortunate. I have an older brother and older sister, and I'm the youngest. I was very much...

the baby of the family in the regards that I feel like I got the most presents at Christmas, funny things like that. But then I also feel like I was sidelined a lot. My brother's kind of high maintenance. My sister is handicapped, so she had a lot of needs. She has a physical disability that puts her in a wheelchair and slows her speech and dis-enables her from using her left arm. I shared a room with my sister up until I was 15.

Sometimes in the middle of the night she would just be crying really hard and I'd have to go get my parents because they wouldn't hear it. And sometimes they wouldn't wake up and I would be like banging on their door. I very much would wake up in the context that someone else was not more important than me, like I didn't matter, but had needs that needed to be met immediately.

This used to be a joke between me and my close friends when I was little. The joke was that my parents would come in and rub my sister's back and wake her up and play like Mozart. And they'd say, get up, you know what I mean? It felt funny at the time. There's a lot of things that felt funny at the time that now when I'm older, I'm looking back and I was like, that was really messed up.

Both my sister and my brother have anger management issues. There were times she'd get mad at me and she would charge me in her wheelchair. And a lot of people would infantilize my sister and would make me really angry. And I'd also say, you know, my sister can be such a princess. My friends would say, oh, you have to be nicer, whatever.

You don't know what she's going through." And I would say, "You don't know what she's going through. She's a regular person at the end of the day. She's not mentally handicapped. She's physically handicapped." Even though I felt very special and very loved and everything, oftentimes I was left to my own devices. That's kind of the way my life was as a kid. She can handle herself.

I was always very compassionate to what my parents had to manage. So I thought, "I can handle it." And my "I can handle it" attitude started really early and continued. And I'm still that way. Did I set that expectation? Was I raised to be that way? Certainly it's a combination of the two. It was a blessing and a curse. As I was getting older, like in my teenage years, a lot of people would confide in me. And I became a confidential source.

It can be a really gratifying thing and you feel really happy to be able to give that to people, but it can also be a huge burden because now you know everybody's trauma, everybody's woe, everybody's pain. And all you want to do is help them. All you want to do is make it better. I tend to attract a lot of people that need to be told they need to be tougher, that have a lot of weaknesses and have a lot of trauma issues.

And over time, what it does to a person who thinks they're helping is makes you feel worthless. You start to feel worthless because you're so obsessed with helping everybody else and they become used to the norm of you not expressing any needs or any emotional weaknesses that they think you have none. And they, again, just like my parents, just assume that you're fine. That compounds into feelings of worthlessness.

My parents were hippies. Authentically.

So they were very free and they were constantly saying things I didn't want to hear, being told things I didn't want to know nor talk about. So I became very private and I also was kind of, like I said, cloistered. Like I had my first kiss when I was 14, which was way older than most of my friends. But then I got my first boyfriend and it was very much like that scene in Wayne's World Dreamweaver. Like I saw him walk in a room and I was like, "Oh, he's the man of my dreams." Right?

And then I became the first friend in my friendship group that had sex. It kind of went from zero to 60. I dated him for two years in high school and then we broke up and I dated another guy. Oh, and the first guy was bulimic, telling me everything. He had been molested by his neighbor. Like, oh, just such a hard story. But overachiever, got really great grades, played all the sports, whatever.

Next boyfriend, super overachiever. Like now he works for the UN. He's an amazing person. Brilliant. He had tried to kill himself, right? And he, everyone thought he was gay. He had been suicidal and I got to know all about that and just another crazy situation.

Then I went off to college and I went to college in Chicago and I ended up dating a guy and this was the weirdest one. I wasn't interested in him. I thought he was really funny. He just made me laugh a lot. He was handsome and all that jazz. But then as soon as I got to know him in a context that wasn't friends anymore and now we were dating, again, another person highly traumatized. Like he had been on psychiatric medicine since he was a child. He told me he never had an authentic feeling of happiness as a kid.

And then as our relationship evolved, it became, you're the only reason I have to live. So we dated for two years in college and everything was generally fine. But I did two internships abroad and I lived in New York City for a bit, like after I graduated from college. When I did my second internship abroad, he wouldn't come visit me. And it was really annoying. But I also missed him.

He picked me up from the airport, drove me back to his condo. I walk in and there's like a little gift situation on the bed with like a stuffed animal Cthulhu, which was pretty rad. And that's the first thing I saw. And I said, wow, that's so cool. And he said, well, what about the box in front of it? And immediately I went in my head, like not in the good way. It was definitely the most awkward proposal in human history. And he said, so do you wanna? And I said, sure.

It was the worst. It was the worst. And everything inside me was saying, say no, say no, say no. But the reason I said yes is because I thought he was going to kill himself if I said no. And I was so worried about him in that regard that I said yes, even though the second I got off the plane, I thought to myself, you should have stayed. You should have kept doing what you were doing. Like it was going really well. And then I spent the next two years trying to figure out how to get out of it without him killing himself.

I ended up spending then the bulk of that engagement away in New York. Then we moved to California. We drove across the country. Super fun. The second we get to California, he just tanks. Doesn't want to leave our apartment. All he does is play video games. He's eating through his savings. And we were just fighting. I felt like I was fighting with my teenage son, but here I was 24 years old. I was an actor for 10 years.

The place that I could get away from his bullshit was in the theater. And I got into two shows at the same time. Here comes the first rehearsal for the musical. And I walk in and there's a man sitting at a chair. And again, Dreamweaver happens. Like, but big time Dreamweaver. And I was like, that is the hottest man I've ever seen in my entire life. And I'm going to marry him. That's what went into my head, like in a lightning bolt. Hottest man ever. I will marry him.

We ended up getting together and yeah it was not right the way that I did it. I was young and didn't know how to tell people no. This is another quality of like when you're compassionate but immature

You don't know how to bring people down. You don't know how to tell someone no, even if it's better for you. You just eat all of your problems, all of your sorrow, all of your nervousness, all of your anxiety. And it's highly problematic. But then also you end up hurting them because maybe you're deceitful. I was very deceitful if I thought it was going to hurt someone's feelings.

So yeah, I had a full-blown affair. I wasn't married yet, but I had a full-blown relationship because I didn't know how to tell the guy that I had been with that I didn't want to be with him anymore, even though our relationship had been really dead for about a year and a half at this point.

The guy, the guy that ended up becoming my husband, he seemed so strong, like he was physically strong and he just seemed very emotionally strong too. And I had two dreams about him during this period of time. And in both dreams, he was Superman. It was my interior monologue telling me you need someone who protects you because you're over it. You're over being everybody else's protector.

I'm telling him I need to break up with this guy. I need to break up with this guy. I don't know what to do. And he's dropping me off outside my house after rehearsal. And he looks at me and says, you have a choice. You could be with me. And I don't know if it's going to last a day, a year or forever, but you're definitely going to be happier than being with him because you're so miserable. And so break up with the other guy. And it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. And then I went through this

Six month period that really sucked because as soon as I did that, this person that I ended up marrying showed some of his true colors, some of his inability to cope with strong decisions. And he just didn't speak to me for about six months. And we saw each other only not in passing, but only a little bit because we kept getting cast in the same shows. But I had this instinct, this thing inside that was telling me it was right.

And it ended up being right. And it ended up being that he had fallen in love with me and he was scared. So we ended up moving in together. But he grew up evangelical Christian because his parents are so Christian and he's so obsessed with their approval. We got a two bedroom apartment and had to pretend not to be in a relationship.

And then we started talking about getting married. And he would do it in a way that was very upsetting to me. He would say, I want to marry you. And I'd get all excited. And then he'd say, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. I didn't mean that. I'm not sure. And he would do that to me over and over and over again.

At one point, I burst into tears, make him pull over in the middle of the highway. And I say, you can't do this to me anymore. And for me, I feel like the only time I've ever had meaningful change or being listened to by a person is when I have to explode. Like I just keep it all to myself and then just pop into this extreme emotion. We got engaged right then and there.

And everyone was happy. Everyone was like, oh, we're so happy for you. This is so great. Even though he was extremely eccentric and problematic in many ways, again, like a grown up child, everyone was happy and we were really happy and things were going really well. And then we got married seven months later, stayed in the Bay for a year. Really great. Moved to New York to pursue our dreams.

But then he also kind of tanked as like the strong guy. As soon as he was out of his little nest of California where he had grown up, New York ate him alive and he became like a child man. And then I was raising a child man. As I got older, I started to appreciate children a little bit better, but I didn't want one.

And of course we discussed it, but we both agreed that like, why would we have a kid when we're actors and our lives are crazy and they're very transient and we never have money. But then when I was maybe late 28, I started thinking, I don't want a kid now, but if I ever want one, I should probably stop taking birth control because there's a lot of medical evidence that sometimes you have to have this really long period of time being off of it.

At this point, I had left acting and I was trying to transition into a different career. Because I was transitioning into a different career, we were going to have more money and more stability and medical insurance and those sorts of things. And that's when it just caught fire in my brain, like, I'm ready. I'm ready. And at this point, I was close to being 31. The second that I said I'm ready, we tried it and I got pregnant right away. And then unfortunately, I had a miscarriage.

It was very painful. It was like a complete drain of your whole body. It's like your body is just in utter rebellion. And I was really upset. I was really sad. And then so I went into this mode after where I became kind of like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. Just like working out and like eating like incredibly well. And I thought, I'm just going to become a machine.

even though I was a professional dancer already, like I got in like the best shape of my life. And I ended up getting pregnant in December of 2011. I had a really amazing pregnancy. I was really happy, super, super happy. And for the first time in our relationship, and at this point we had been married for seven years, my husband was treating me like gold.

attended to everything I needed, made me dinner, made me breakfast, made me lunch, sent me off to work with a little kiss on the cheek. He couldn't take enough pictures of me and he couldn't celebrate me enough and he couldn't talk highly about me enough and absolutely the prince that I had always been waiting for. Like the magic has finally come to me because I've been so patient. Everything I had ever wanted was finally happening. I felt like I had arrived.

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This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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And I have a funny feeling. That's all I can describe it as. And then I wake up my husband and I say, I think I'm in labor. And that was the last time I said, I think.

And everything I learned, like, do this with your hips and do this with your breathing, whatever. You do whatever you want when you're in labor. It's like you're an animal and you're just trying to survive. It's the worst. I don't like the way women butter up the pain. And this is another mission I have. I'm not going to pretend that it was some, like, beautiful experience. When you get past a certain point and you've not given birth yet, it's a nightmare because you're like, how long is this going to go on?

I took 33 hours to get to that point because at one point I was desperate to sleep. Finally, I had hit four centimeters and we high-fived the nurses. It was like the best, the last best moment. Once I went into what's called active labor and you're fully dilated, he came out in 20 minutes. They do something called skin-to-skin and they put your baby on your bare chest like right away.

I was looking down at him and he was looking up to at me and it's literally like he was saying like, "I'm glad that's over." Like that was the look on his face because the whole time you're in labor the baby's awake too. So he had been awake for two days at this point too and he was like, "I'm so done." And it was like, "Yeah, I get you and you get me."

One thing that happens after you give birth is like during pregnancy, all these hormones are getting generated in your body for yourself and for the baby. And a lot of those are these very positive hormones. And what can happen to a lot of women is those hormone levels drop as soon as you give birth. So it's literally like you're on drugs and someone takes your drugs away. But because you're not on drugs, you don't know what's going on. You don't know why it's happening. It's very confusing.

This is the cruelest part. It had been such a beautiful pregnancy full of happiness and joy. All those good feelings are immediately gone and you feel like swept into a black hole. It was immediate. I didn't feel like I was happy. I just felt like I saw him and acknowledged him. I felt like everything was really distant from me. People started feeling...

Like I couldn't connect with them. My husband was so happy. He was so happy. And he was telling me, I love you so much. And like, that wasn't normal for him to be that effusive. And it made me feel nothing. The fact that I felt almost no emotion, I was trying to attribute to just being tired. There was something chemical happening that wasn't letting me sleep at all.

So I was getting these like mini sleeps that were really bad is the only way I can describe it. And it was clear that something deeply psychological was happening.

I was just like operating like some kind of machine animal, just like feeding the baby and walking around like a psychopath and like absolutely no clothes practically, which is weird for me because I'm very private and not, like I said, sleeping at all. And I have this vivid memory of it being maybe three in the morning and we're both leaning over our baby in our bed and we're like, please go to sleep, please go to sleep. And he goes to sleep and...

My husband goes to sleep and I'm laying next to them and I have to pee like worse than I've ever had to pee in my whole life maybe. And I thought if I get up and he wakes up, I'll kill myself. And so I just peed in my bed. Next day I confessed to my husband that I had done that. He was like, I think you have postpartum depression. But he said it in a way that was like he was disgusted. With that look on his face, I was like, no, no, no, no, that's not what's happening. And

But it's like, it was almost like the thought implanted it, which allowed me to go there. Because then I just went into this full-blown kind of almost catatonic state. I remember I was sitting in a chair and I couldn't even like move for like a full day. And it was this weird feeling where I...

saw my neighbor out on his porch and I was totally naked from the waist up and I'm looking at him and he looks at me and he stops sweeping and I'm not even moving. I'm just like staring at him and he's staring at me and I was like he can tell I'm fucked up right now. And I can feel everyone moving around me and I literally can't move. It was like that movie Get Out and they talk about the sunken place and

I'm clearly not a woman of color and I don't know the of color experience in the least, but I can really relate to that feeling because it was like I was down here and the body was out here being something else or someone else. I didn't really have any kind of leave from work. I had some PTO and that was that. And I remember sitting in front of my computer. They were going to let me work remote and just staring at it and feeling completely like

literally incapable of typing. I couldn't get my arms to move to the keyboard and that took a really long time. And once I did it, that's all that happened. I just had my hands on the keyboard staring at it. And then this voice way deep saying, God, I hope they don't fire you, you know, for not doing anything at all. And I kept thinking, just move the mouse around.

I'm just a very gregarious person, very animated. And so not moving at all was a huge indicator of how bad it had become. It was like otherworldly, like I was an alien that had stolen my body. My doctor was checked in for that first six weeks because I couldn't get medication. And she was telling my husband, she needs to get out. She needs to work out. She needs to get out like

If she stays in her psychology will become worse like she needs to move you need to help her. No one was helping me do shit. Everyone was so terrified by my behavior that their reaction was to do nothing and pretend like it wasn't happening. So again, I was up to my own devices. I had to take care of myself.

And taking care of yourself when you are that psychologically incapable is, I can only liken it to like, you're pulling like a big, you know, one of those corny like cartoons of pushing a big boulder up a mountain. You know, something that's like five tons and you're just a person. Just an arduous process, like unbelievably insurmountable. It was unreal. And I felt like every single thing I did was like that.

I knew my advisement was to get out and here's this food festival. And I thought, gosh, maybe I can walk to the food festival, which was literally like two blocks away. So I get my kid in his stroller.

And I walk over to the festival and I thought, oh, maybe I'll get like an ice cream and that'll cheer me up. And I get all the way to the little booth and I get to my turn and I order and they have the cone and I look down and realize I didn't bring my wallet.

All my movements were like a turtle too at this time. I moved kind of in this slow sloth-like way and I would turn my head really slow and like lift my eyes really slow. And so I did that to her and I went, I don't have any money. I'm staring at her for like what seems like an unbelievably extended amount of time, like just hoping she'll just fucking give it to me. And she's just cannot respond, cannot react.

And so I like walk away sloth style, just like pushing his stroller away and feeling like so worthless that someone can't even give me an ice cream for free. And I'm like falling apart mentally and I can't do shit and I'm such a loser. Like all those thoughts were going through my head. Like you're worthless. You're a loser. You're a failure. You failed. You failed.

You can't be happy. You can't feel love. And that's what the first six weeks were, were just this feeling of profound failure. My husband was starting to resent me like really bad. And I had been the strong one and to see me so weakened didn't spark compassion in him. It sparked disgust.

And maybe that's common. Like when strong people suddenly fall apart, it's like too shocking to acknowledge or too shocking to manage. So he was just disgusted with me and offended by my behavior. So his whole reaction to it often became like either ignore it, pretend like it's not happening or this attitude of get your shit together.

My obstetrician had a nurse that worked with her and I went to the nurse and she gave me a prescription of like an antidepressant, an anti-anxiety medication and left it at that. And the combination that she gave me I thought was very effective. But it was only temporary because she wasn't a physician. So that stabilized me really well. I was finally able to sleep and that was incredibly restorative.

But then my obstetrician recommended a psychiatrist for me to see. So I go to see the psychiatrist and he tells me off the bat, I've never treated anyone with postpartum depression. And again, I was so weakened emotionally at this point that I didn't, I had no spine. This guy said, but I think I can help you. And so I thought, okay, great. Like you can help me. So he put me on an antidepressant. He put me on anti-anxiety medication. First, it was Ativan.

because I had insomnia and there is some evidence that this medication helps people sleep. And he said, just so you know though, in some people it can increase appetite. So let me know, you know, if that sort of thing is happening and things are going relatively well, but because I'm on so much medication, my usual like spark was kind of gone, had a job, was doing my job just fine.

Coming home, taking care of my kid, interacting with my husband. Like, I thought things were on the up and up. Even though I was feeling really emotionally distant and really disconnected and I still didn't feel that feeling of love toward my baby yet. And here, my best friend had had a kid seven months prior to me and she could not shut up about how much she loved him and how much love was flowing through her constantly. It was weird. It was like, I felt like something was wrong with me so I didn't want to talk about it with anybody.

All I would say to people is like, do things get better? And they're like, oh yeah, things get so much better. Like once you get past X, Y, Z and you're going to be fine. But nothing was getting better. The feedback that I was getting for the first year was that like my personality had like disappeared. And I was kind of like this robotic version of myself. And I remember my mom saying to me,

You've lost your spark. And the feeling inside, all I wanted to be was like, maybe if someone acted like they gave a fuck about me, like I would be able to work on my emotions. But instead, I didn't say a damn thing. And that was also part of this black hole, distant sunken place thing where the person in me that had any courage or any strength was so far down that

The medication is part of that. And I have to take ownership over the fact that I must have been a real pain in the ass to be around during this time. Just like no personality, not a fun person. I was sleeping in this way that I was absolutely militantly obsessed with going to bed at nine to the point that I was ruining everybody else's night. Really neurotic. Like I had developed all of these neuroses that I didn't have before. And one of them was like nine o'clock. I'm in my bed. I don't give a shit.

One thing they tell people is that postpartum depression usually lasts a year. So when I hit a year, everyone felt cheated and my husband felt angry and he felt angry at me. And he literally said to me, like, it's been a year. Why aren't you better? That first year, he was kind of light asshole because our son was only a baby. It was only after he became ambulatory that the shit really hit the fan.

We had to leave our neighborhood. We got priced out. We end up in this house in a bad neighborhood. There's a lot of drug dealers we didn't know. And it was a huge mistake because now I was really isolated from other people. And I also quit my job and got a job at something way more boring. I also had gained a bunch of weight.

So I told my psychiatrist and he said, well, let's change to Seroquel because Seroquel doesn't have that eating byproduct, but it will help you with sleep. And this medication absolutely ruined my life for about a year and a half, like destroyed my life.

It changed my brain. It changed the way that I made decisions. It changed the way that I rationalized things. And this is awful and I'm glad I can finally talk about it, but I just was alone a lot and never wanted to leave and my husband was working at night so when my kid would go to bed I just started like having a beer. Which turned into having two.

At first, it was just a little bit. But then when we moved to that more suburban area and they switched my medication and my son became ambulatory. So now he's running around and driving my husband absolutely, completely insane. And my husband starts talking in a bad way about our kid, like he's a bad kid. I just started drinking in a way that I can't even believe that I did. Because when I was drinking, I would start to feel something.

Clearly everybody had to have seen how much I was drinking because I was drinking about six beers and two bottles of wine every single day. I got to the point that I started buying beers at the corner store when I was at work and going into the bathroom and drinking them. And at night I would drive to the BevMo, buy a ton of wine bottles, put my kid to bed and

drink them, like sometimes three, and then go outside because I didn't want them in my recycling and chuck them down the street. And I started enjoying the sound of them breaking. It was like my act of rebellion. I got to a place where I was drinking and driving. It was so bad. I was putting hard alcohol into my coffee. So I was literally drinking constantly. I was taking, you

And you're not supposed to drink at all when you take Klonopin. And I would have a beer next to my bed and have the Klonopin, put it in my mouth, drink the beer, go get another one, put it next to my bed to be there. And I would think to myself, you know, if you die in your sleep, it's okay. Everyone's better off if you die. And it wasn't like I actively was suicidal.

Because I wasn't. I wasn't going to shoot myself. I wasn't going to hang myself. But I started feeling like everyone would be better if you were dead. It was literally like I was like a facade and the me, the real me was inside observing it.

And desperately wanting to express herself and desperately wanting to be heard and desperately wanting to talk. But being profoundly afraid of being honest and then being told, you can't be a mom. You're a bad mom. You're a bad person. You're a bad wife. You're a bad everything. When my son was a baby, I would play with him and just look at him and wish I was feeling something.

but not tell anybody, especially not my husband, because I knew if I told him any of that, he would start making accusations about me. And I was just terrified of him

finding a way or his parents who were completely evil of taking my kid away from me and I knew that I loved my kid but I didn't feel it and there's like a very that's a very distinct state of being where you know you love someone and you can't feel it but goddamn anyone who tries to take that person away from you be they a child or an adult because you know that there's just something you're going through and it doesn't diminish the love that you actually have it's just you can't feel it

Then when he became a toddler and he could start to walk and speak, wow, he's got a personality. Wow, I like this guy. I just thought he was the best. I thought he was the best. And I started to feel the love. But my kid clearly liked him better at this time. I would try to cuddle my son and he would wriggle out of my arms and sit next to me. I literally felt like for this period of time, he didn't give a shit about me.

To me, it was like this completely unbiased opinion. He's a baby. He's a little kid. Like he can't do something on purpose. He's without guile. And he still thinks I'm worthless. Oh, I must really be worthless. And so that increased the feelings of wanting to drink all the time, to feel something, and to disappear. And I felt like everyone else wanted me to disappear too, to be honest.

And I felt like, again, like I had done something wrong. And so I too didn't want to really address it. So in general, I never really talked about it with anyone except I would make attempts and then regret it.

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And then I had, when I changed jobs again and I was like way at the bottom and starting in a new industry, the woman who had trained me and then became like my friend, I really latched on to her and I wasn't used to latching on to anybody. We're still friends and she has said like, you know, I never realized how much you were going through. I never realized until you came out of it, like the way your personality bloomed when you came out of it. But she knew something because she had her own life intensities.

And so she allowed me to latch onto her like that 'cause she could tell something was going on, but we never super talked about it. I had this, I still have this really close friend and she is my best friend, you know, like a sister.

She was a very busy person, had a really busy career, but her level of concern for me was way beyond anybody else's level of concern. She was really worried about me and so she was staying in touch with me a lot during that period of time and we would go take our kids to this play area that was close to where she lived. And so this one time we met at this kid's place and I had bought a little flask of whiskey

and put it in my coffee. And this was the first time I did that, where I did it at a thing that wasn't at my house. I had put the whiskey in my coffee and I didn't know that she had watched me do it. She took me aside and she said, "I saw you put whiskey in your coffee. You can't go home. You can't drive."

And I can't describe the amount of shame and embarrassment that I felt. Unbelievable. Like I burst into tears. She made me come to her house. She made me eat something. And she called my husband and told him. And I was just beyond the pale of embarrassed. And then after that weekend, I had a surprise intervention at my house. And that was incredible.

hands down the most out of body experience I've had besides like feeling really sunken in the black hole at the beginning of my postpartum depression because I was thinking I'm not an alcoholic. I knew for a fact that the medication I was on was making it happen to me, but I couldn't articulate that. So here I'm having this intervention. It's just like the TV show. Like people are telling you this written statement that they have and

And I was just kind of like listening to it, wanting to be like, you're all full of shit. None of you give a fuck about me. Suddenly you care because my friend called you and demanded that you come here. My mom's a recovering alcoholic. She had gone to rehab when I was in college. And so it triggered her, triggered my dad, everybody, my brother. It was just a mess.

And so they're leading me out and my husband comes up to me and he's crying and he puts his hands on me and he's like, I'm just so worried about you. And for some reason I was like, you're full of shit. You don't care. Like you more than anyone wanted me to just disappear and hope that I died in my sleep. Cause you totally were watching me drink while taking medication. Like give me a fucking break. My husband,

A friend drives me to the AA meeting and we go together. And then here I am with my friend and all these people and I'm like, these are actual alcoholics. I'm a fraud. Like I shouldn't be here. It's not fair to them. But I had to stand up and do the whole thing. And I felt so fraudulent. I was just like, this is so unfair to everyone in this room. Everyone was like, now she has to start going to these meetings. And I would go and I would drive and I would just sit in my car and listen to NPR.

and say, oh, I'm going to a meeting. But I was actually just listening to the radio for like an hour and I would drive home or whatever. So what ended up happening was that I stopped drinking cold turkey. Absolutely. Because I was like, I don't want anyone taking my kid from me more than anything. It wasn't a problem. I was never addicted. I think I really, really just wanted someone to see me really bad. I felt completely invisible. And also at this time I had grown my hair probably like

all the way to the bottom of my back and I wasn't drying it with a blow dryer. So it was really flat. I felt like the ugliest person on the planet. So might as well not try at all. And I never wore makeup and I would wear baggy clothes. It's like they made me feel like I was disappearing. So I was trying to disappear too.

It's like if someone has cancer and they're disintegrating in front of you, or someone has Alzheimer's and their personality is just disappearing. I was still completely there with like a healthy body, but like my character was starting to disintegrate and they couldn't cope with it. And I think a lot of people can't cope with when they lose the person. So they just pretend that it's not happening.

My best friend, for example, when she confronted me, she said, I don't care if you hate me for the rest of your life. I just don't want you to die. But my parents, they totally were going to let me completely die and just not lift a finger until it happened and then probably be really upset. I was the one who managed the house. I managed the finances. I managed our logistics. I managed everything. My husband was escalating and controlling behavior, which he later admitted was

happened because he felt like everything was so out of control with me. His reaction to that was to become highly militant, very condemnative and very controlling. It was almost like a stereotype. Like he definitely started telling me who I could be friends with and when I could go out. And if I ever wanted to do anything just for me, I was a bad mom. And because he came from the evangelical family, his family was feeding that information to him too.

But again, because of the way we frame motherhood in the United States, a mom in the modern world is almost like a robot that needs to make money, needs to have a job, needs to come home and cook all the food and take care of the kid and have absolutely no identity. Like we strip mothers of their identity the second the child is born.

It took me years to recover from these feelings, and I was really angry at my now ex-husband and my parents for this very reason. And I'm just now able to grapple with some of that. Where my ex-husband is concerned, I've basically forgiven him for what he had to go through and for his behavior. But my parents are a different story. I'm still working through that.

When all this stuff went down and then it became clear that my psychiatrist wasn't doing his job, I go to this hospital. I walk in and my kid at this point is two and a half. And there's a leather couch and I'm sitting on it and the staff psychologist is over here. And I was just almost mumbling like in my listlessness. I don't even know what the hell I was talking about because he just goes, okay, wait, wait, wait. You need to stop.

Because I did list everything that I had been taking, all the medicines. He saw that I was deep in the danger zone. And he's like, you need to stop everything tonight. It's going to suck. You're going to have the worst three weeks of your life. But when it's over, you will be so glad you did this.

And it was like something went off in my head, like someone cares enough to look me in the face and be like, you're doing this right now. It's going to be fine, but it's going to suck at the beginning. But I'm telling you, you'll come out of the other end. And I realized in that moment that I had no end zone. I felt like this was going into perpetuity.

When someone told me, yeah, there's an end, it was like the most glorious feeling. And I went home super empowered. And he also said, I want you to journal every single night. And I recently found those and the handwriting is insane, like completely almost illegible. And yeah, it was a really, really sucky three weeks. I was so out of control emotionally, like bursting into tears for no reason, thinking the weirdest thoughts, thinking I was offending every single person.

When it was over, this is so stupid, it's like a movie, but I chopped my long cousin-it hair off and bleached it white and I was like, "I'm back. I'm renewed. Here's the little phoenix coming out." And that was literally like my phoenix moment. Like I had died and turned into ash and then I came out. When I got off all that medication,

It was like literally coming out of a hole or coming out of a grave. That feeling of bursting through the dirt and my hand comes out and I'm pulling myself out. That's how it all ended. And once I got off the medication, it was like back to being myself. But I went through a really long period of being super pissed. It's the distillation of all of the feelings of being abandoned.

Like having everyone abandoned you and the whole time you were aware. It's like you were in a coma, but you could hear everything. So I came out of my coma. I'm like, you talk shit about me the whole time. So you're just hyper pissed.

That level of empowerment I actually think is good for people and especially moms because we're so stripped of our value and so stripped of our identity and so stripped of our worth that I think that moms deserve a bit of like an ego trip sometimes, a lot of the time. And I don't mind moms going on an ego trip, especially if they've been so emotionally eviscerated.

I would do things that were inappropriate. Like I started hitting on everyone. If someone was attractive, if they had a boyfriend, if they had a fiance, if it was my friend's husband, I didn't give a fuck. I was just hitting on everybody and dressing like a little bit more like proud of myself, which started to border on kind of scandalous. I was just totally on fire for about a year. And I fought with my then husband constantly and he became a tremendous tyrant.

I then decided to just completely re-empower myself. And like, it was a big fuck you to everybody. And I went back to school and got a master's degree. And I had been able to get back in an environment of dialogue and thinking and writing and critique and questioning and like the place that I'm happy. And I realized like he had really tried to destroy that person because that person threatened him. So I needed to get away from him. I asked him for a divorce halfway through it.

But we ended up making it through and we decided for our kids sake we should stay friends and we are really good friends. And then I became like hyper obsessed with being supportive of any other young mom or any other mom going through postpartum or any mom whose postpartum had been ignored or misrepresented or misdiagnosed or any type of shame that people felt surrounding it. And I was also super pissed at people for pretending like their lives were so great.

You don't have to pretend like your life is great, at least to me. In fact, tell everyone you're not doing great because the more we talk about it, the more we're all helping each other. And we're helping our kids too because you can't be a good parent if you don't have your own identity intact.

And I think that's actually fundamental. And we're doing a huge disservice to the next generation of human beings by stripping moms of their identity and making them feel bad about literally everything from the way they look to the way they act, to the way that they respond to the planet, to the way that they do their job. This one friend of mine who was also very instrumental in helping me get better. She asked me a couple of years ago, now that you know what happened, like the aftermath, would you do it again? Would you have your kid again?

And I was like, if I knew that the kid that I actually have was the kid I was going to have, absolutely. If I didn't know what that kid was going to be like, and someone told me I was going to go through that nightmare, I don't know. I honestly don't know. But the fact that my child is like living light, an unbelievably incredible human being that spreads joy wherever he goes and everybody loves him. I would do it again, like right now. He's so amazing.

And it's interesting because like my dad has said, it's almost like he took everything out of you and you had to grow it back like a starfish. So if that's the price, then I'm actually okay because I made it. I made it out.

I'm doing better than I've ever done. I'm more empowered. And so one of the things too, that's kind of like the weirdest byproduct is how empowered I am now. Because I had to get to a point of almost dying to see how alone I was, to see how most people had complete disinterest in helping me. And the only person that I could count on was me.

All women, especially the moms, need to be able to be their full self and show young men and boys what a woman should be. And maybe by then, too, we'll have such appreciation of women and motherhood that we'll have really sophisticated and effective ways of managing postpartum depression. Because I can only imagine how many people that it affects and never gets treated. I worked at a big corporation that was really into mindfulness.

With mindfulness, it helped me in a way that I can't ever appreciate enough.

Because it allowed me to objectify what I was going through and then put it away or objectify the way I was being treated and then put it away. And that's just part of it clearly, right? It's so freeing. And like, and in my case, it really helped me overcome that psychological piece of the postpartum depression that had nothing to do with the chemistry.

Because postpartum depression is almost exclusively chemistry, but then it affects the psychology. And so you need to come back somehow. And for me, traditional therapy, talk therapy isn't really effective. So being empowered to kind of dictate my own reality through mindfulness and also develop a lot more compassion and gratitude.

Between the friends of mine who had the courage and the strength of character to be really direct with me at the point of maybe sacrificing the friendship, coupled with that psychologist at that hospital, plus whatever miracle put me into the mindfulness class. And, you know, then I practiced mindfulness pretty actively for a year. It's like one of the best things that you could ever dedicate some disciplined time to, I think.

I kept all my problems to myself. I was nothing but a receiver of other people's problems and like a support system, almost like everybody's unpaid staff psychologist. And I don't really do that anymore. I like being there for people for sure, but I have really specific boundaries now. That's my addiction is making people feel good. And so I definitely lost that person.

Like I literally died and came back a better person, just like the Phoenix. It might be trite. It might be cliche. But although it was a horrible experience, I'm really grateful for it because it opened the gateway for me to be me. We can't control who's going to have psychological trauma or mental illness or anything like that. At least not now.

But those of us who have made it out on the other side, I think by and large are empowered to help others so they don't have to go through it. I don't think everyone or anyone should have to go through something that almost kills them to become their best self. So those of us who have to go through it are now the hosts to those other people so they don't have to. And I feel like that's my role now to a certain extent. ♪

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Welcome to the offensive line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agarne.

So here's how this show is going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.