Today, I’d like to write a post of appreciation for the nurse at my primary care physician. I had to laugh at the fatigue in her eyes when she saw me in the waiting room. For a moment, she forgot her pleasantries, and I could see a small part of her die as she recognized…
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The Deep Blues Sea
(Content warning: this post discusses details of my psychiatric hospitalization. If that’s triggering for you, you may want to skip this one, and know that I’m sending you all my love). This week I walked with a friend and her four-month-old. It’s surreal to watch my friends with babies now and to realize that my…
Read MoreComing to Terms with Your Selves
Last week was the first official walk I took while talking to another survivor of postpartum psychosis. It is such a comfort to talk to other survivors, and so inspiring. She is an unbelievably strong person. It takes a unique kind of strength to come to terms with your psychotic self. That part of you…
Read MoreTime Before Time
This week, I talked to Erica while I walked. Erica and I used to work together, and first got to know each other by taking walks along the river outside our office, whenever either of us needed a mental break from the frenzied pace of the day. I can’t believe that it’s been almost a…
Read MoreAn Attitude of Gratitude
The last time I wrote, I reflected that a bad day doesn’t have to turn into a bad week. But sometimes it does. And sometimes one bad week turns into another. I’ve been having a tough time lately, and I wish I had a more insightful or eloquent way of saying that. But one of…
Read MoreThe Last Crazy Straw
“It’s strange how we can hold so many different truths in our mind at once,” Kate says as we walk today. We are talking about breastfeeding, but we could be talking about so many things. Kate knows about holding disparate truths in her mind and heart, because she had a baby during the pandemic, like…
Read MoreTeach for Mom-erica
My husband was sick last week, so it was just me on Bailey duty. The first day was the roughest, with Bailey being in one of those moods where everything that’s not a toy is a toy, and everything that is a toy is completely uninteresting. So the next day, I was determined to make…
Read MoreBeauty and the Grief
Today, I walked with another friend from my old job, Janice. Janice was one of the first people who reached out to me after I gave birth to offer me emotional support and a space to talk about the realities of what I was going through, before I began traveling through a different reality entirely.…
Read MoreStranger in a Strange Body
As I walked by myself this week, I thought about my body. One of the reasons that walking has been so helpful is that it grounds me in my body. Reminds me that no matter how caught up I get in the workings of my mind, I have a physical presence as well. A presence…
Read MorePsychoSister: Qu’est-ce que c’est?
Sometimes even I have a hard time following my own story. It’s complicated. So I’m going to try to provide some context to help make my stories a little bit clearer. One of the first questions I always get is “Wait, did you have postpartum bipolar or postpartum psychosis?” Even after talking to multiple health…
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Postpartum Psychosisterhood 