In an effort to not only communicate my experiences with postpartum depression but also to let others know they aren't suffering alone, I have created a series of images illustrating some of the many intense symptoms that may be experienced during postpartum depression (otherwise known as PPD).
Test number nine. Two lines the color of a robin’s egg. The faintest of those two lines would change the course of my life more drastically and fantastically than I could grasp at the time. In fact, if I hadn't pried apart the plastic housing and held the tiny strip up to the window so that daylight could filter through it, I might have missed that faint blue line altogether.
I had no idea what to expect in nine months, but I was more excited than I had ever been before. Announcing that I was pregnant invited countless nuggets of advice: what to buy, how to swaddle a newborn, and more.
Despite the advice, nothing could have prepared me for the emotion, fear, and awe that I felt when I first laid eyes upon my newborn son. The first couple of weeks were a whirlwind. Amid the chaos, it’s hard to pinpoint when it began.
Rather than a defining moment, I can best describe the onset as a slow encroaching of muck that began in the periphery of my mind and crept into every wrinkle of my brain until it defined me. I didn't realize it was there until I didn't recognize myself. I didn't know it had a name. My desire to disappear when my baby cried, my inability to sleep even when I had the chance, my feelings of rage over inconsequential nothings, feeling like a shell of my former self and unable to function normally- this was Postpartum Depression.
I struggled for weeks with symptoms I thought were unique to myself, suffering silently and fearing judgement. I learned my symptoms had a name privately in my doctor’s office. Sure, I’d heard of Postpartum Depression, PPD, before, but it was a foreign word to me. Some disease I’d surely never need to be familiar with.
When I learned what I was going through had a name, it meant that I didn’t have to suffer in secrecy. As if a shroud had been pulled back to reveal the culprit that imprisoned me, I learned there was hope. This name was a light shining on the outlets of support available to mothers experiencing PPD.
I've come to realize PPD awareness would have been a more valuable tool than the advice I was given about diapers and formula. When a child is born, a mother is also born into a world decorated with unique, amazing, and terrifying experiences. Unfortunately it’s assumed that we will all smoothly and seamlessly arrive at motherhood feeling whole and accomplished.
Awareness is armor we should all don as human beings in order to seek support and to offer understanding to our friends and loved ones. One of the things I wish I could tell myself as I suffered with postpartum depression is that there is a future without “it†even if you can’t see that future clearly. Rise above and see beyond the symptoms that threaten to bleed the life out of you. There is hope.