Aftershocks.

My psychiatrist recently told me it could take a year or more to truly recover from postpartum depression.  {Like, picture that scene from Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams is being all creepy intense with Matt Damon going “it’s not your fault” – it was kind of like that, but with more squirming uncomfortably and less crying and emotional man-hugs.}  I’m nearly a year out from my diagnosis, and most days I really do feel like ME again.  But then there are some days…days like today…where I start to see my mind unraveling, like it’s not even happening to me.   In the throes of my PPD I would get lost in a sea of irrational fears, unfounded thoughts, self-imposed humiliations…coming up for air only long enough to keep myself from drowning altogether.

Today, I’m not spiraling over irrational fears of imaginary things.  But I am spiraling.   The things that will grab hold of the thread of the sanity I worked so hard to restore and yank until it’s reduced to a pile on the floor nowadays are quite real.  Quite rational.  Grown up things.  Life things.  But I can’t help but remember that there was a time when I wouldn’t let such things control my emotions…my quality of life…my ability to function and press on, YES, even in the face of scary big deal life shit.    The scars of PPD run deep.   Not only are the wounds still healing on my psyche, my confidence, my relationships, and especially my family, but at times – on my ability to sort myself and my feelings out from the illness that so sneakily took hold of what I believed were my conscious thoughts not so long ago.

I can pinpoint the exact minute I realized that I could stop feeling so ashamed and guilty for what I was going through (because I did, I felt SO responsible for SO long).   I was taking a break from all the excitement at the BlogHer Conference in New York, and chatting quietly with Katherine who was sharing how she explained her postpartum OCD to her son.   The way she broke it down for her five year old: “you know how you get sick sometimes and you have to stay home from school and get better?  Well, after you were born, mommy got sick too, in her brain.”   (It’s not an exact quote – I’m loosely paraphrasing a conversation we had six months ago, but you get the gist.)   That clicked for me.   Sick wasn’t crazy.   I’d had stomach bugs, and appendectomies, and tonsillectomies, and basically every other evolutionarily obsolete organ removed, and I’d never felt an iota of shame over any of those things.     I wasn’t crazy.   I wasn’t going to be like this forever.   I had a brain bug.    I just had to fix it.

And I have to say, “fixing” it got a lot easier from that point.   From the point that I finally FINALLY let myself see through the stigma of the “mental” part and focus on the “illness” part, I was able to become a much more active participant in my own recovery.  (And by the way, screw you, basically everyone everywhere for making people with brain sicknesses feel like they have something to be ashamed of.)  But I digress.   I’m talking about today.   And the distracting as hell, center of my chest, pit of my stomach, please-i’ll-do-anything-to-make-it-stop mind spiral over things that DO warrant a little bit of freaking out.   In the wake of the most terrifying car wreck ever, I’m desperately trying to reconcile which feelings are mine, and which feelings are the scars of my PPD bubbling up, taking hold, just for a minute while I sit here, paralyzed, desperately wishing that I could find something, anything to take away the queasy feeling of thousands of tiny bugs writhing under my skin, laughing at and mocking me for being a slave to their nasty, self-doubt instilling whims.

But if there’s one thing (loads of therapy) and climbing out of the depths of that nightmare abyss of PPD has taught me, it’s that there really isn’t any such thing as a hopeless situation.   This too shall pass, right?   Now if I can just keep telling myself that.