August 23, 2008

Spreading the Word

I had the fantastic opportunity recently to be interviewed by Janyce, of Sojourn Quilts from Etsy, on her blog, What Shoes I Wear.

The interview revolves around both my artwork and the role of art-making in my own recovery from postpartum depression. The blog is dedicated to telling womens stories, often through their artwork, and Janyce is a fantastic writer, storyteller, and womens' advocate.

Enjoy.

Posted by mwashburn at 06:55 PM | Comments (2)

April 21, 2008

Those Who Don't Get It

In light of recent events, I thought I'd share, and attempt to refute, a letter published in last month's issue of Wired. K.D. of Los Angeles writes (in part):
The psychiatrists and their bogus "diseases" fool no one. There is nothing wrong with feeling anger, jealousy, or even deep anguish. It's an integral part of being human. Why would we want to blunt something so innate and inextricably woven into our being? Likewise, when the incredible and beautiful moments of life occur, do you want to be slammed on Prozac? I think not.

While I am quite willing to accept the idea that people can, to a frightening degree, self-diagnose psychiatric disorders and walk away from just about any practitioner in any specialty with an antidepressant prescription, I disagree strongly with the idea that people are turning to drugs to blunt normal human emotions. The writer of this letter, clearly, has never been depressed. Of course normal life events trigger everything from "the blues" to deep anguish, and any psychotherapist worth her salt will tell you that, and focus on the real work that most of us need to do to deal with those emotions.

I always pooh-poohed the concept of depression and drugs for depression too. I had my own (some not-so-healthy) mechanisms for dealing with what I was going through, my own existential crises and needs and failings. I went to therapy when it was warranted. I went on with my life. Then my daughter was born and I experienced the very real, very disturbing phenomenon of Postpartum Depression. I got better. Life went on for a couple of years. Then I got worse again. This isn't "gee, I'm a little grumpy about work." This is the physical feeling of not being able to move or summon the energy to do everyday tasks. The inability to focus thoughts, see past tomorrow, or find any hopeful thought in your life. The color drains out of everything, obsessive thoughts take over, and numbness sets in. You just don't want to BE.

I am currently, as the letter-writer so eloquently put it "slammed on Prozac." But you know what? I once again have the energy and drive to make meaning, to experience the profound joy of motherhood, and the ability to think about my goals and do the work to fix what isn't working in my life. For people who experience true depression, drugs can help you once again experience the range of human emotion, not the opposite. Only someone who has never experienced depression and never used antidepressants could think that they result in some sort of zombified happiness. Speaking from ignorance outrages me more than informed opinion, no matter what that opinion might be.

Posted by mwashburn at 07:49 AM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2008

Fits and Starts

There's a common misconception about the relationship between depression and the "artistic temperament." That is, that depression drives the creativity of the individuals prone to it. This is untrue. The creativity happens in the clear periods when the depression lifts and the artist has the energy and focus to create. I am living this reality very much right now.

I have chronicled my bout with postpartum depression here, feeling that my openness on the subject could only help other people who might be going through the same thing. I have not, however, really talked about more garden-variety depression. What I am finding out is that the tools I used to have to stave it off are no longer working for me in this brave new post-childbearing world. I haven't shared this with any but a few close friends and family members, but the last 4-6 months have been very difficult ones for me. When I went through postpartum depression, I felt somehow "ok" about it because there was a fixed, external circumstance I could blame for what I went through. This time has not been as cut and dry, but as before I didn't see what was happening to me until I was at the bottom of the well. It has affected my interaction with other people, my interaction with my family, my work, and definitely my creative output. Now that I'm getting help and feeling the dark cloud lifting, I'm suddenly feeling a huge bloom of creative energy and feeling very optimistic about 2008 as the year I am going to start really "being an artist." I still find myself trying to grasp "why," and having a hard time accepting that there isn't necessarily an answer to that and, once again, that it isn't some mark of failure on my part.

I attended an arts luncheon last week, and found out about several organizations and exhibit opportunities I plan to pursue in the coming months. I just finished a fairly ambitious painting and have two other small ones in progress with sketches for a third. It feels really good to have the color back in my life and to be finding joy and balance again. My goal lately has been to do one artistic thing each day, and I have been living up to that goal pretty well.

So thank you to all of you who have listened to me, offered support, or just been my friend. Here's another recent sketch to share.

Posted by mwashburn at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2006

And Here's Where We Part Ways, She and I

I finally finished reading A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, and found myself utterly disappointed. It started out as a beautifully written description of the despair of the early days of motherhood, capturing very well (or so I thought) my own desperate first days of postpartum depression. However, it never went anywhere. The drudgery plodded on, the despair never resolved or turned to joy, there was no epiphany of the wonder of motherhood or moment of seeking any professional help. I was left with so much sadness that instead of finding her New self, Rachel Cusk simply pushed her daughter away (her daughter seems to be a shadowy, peripheral thing in the book; never referred to by name, and never really acknowledged as a person), resenting her cries, leaving her to cry alone in her room for hours and hours, and ultimately describing the gulf between her and her toddler as if it were some sort of personal freedom. At the end of the book, her daughter falls and cuts herself, pushes her mother away and runs to her father. And, at the beginning of an outing that the author refuses to go on, her daughter left a pair of red boots at the door to her mother's room. I wanted to cry. It is then that Cusk starts to go on about missing the fleeting days of babyhood. But, I wanted to scream, the damage is already done. She revels in her "escape" from breastfeeding at three months.

Yes, this parenthood stuff is hard and oppressive at times. But, in the words of a good mommy friend, "parenthood is a front-end investment." I can't imagine not being as close to Lily as I am now. She is starting to stake out her independence, little by little, but on her own terms. I know her as I know myself. I can only hope that this serves to cement our bond into her entire childhood and even adulthood. I think to the future and hope that this time will bear fruit when Lily is confronted with some of the more difficult choices of growing up. This is all foundation work.

The reason I resorted to medication for my depression was because I felt a rift between how I was supposed to feel about my child (difficulties and all) and how I actually felt. It was like I could see life through a pane of glass, but couldn't get to it. Rather than retreat into myself and make her suffer, in those first endlessly needy months, I got help. I went for the quick fix because I didn't want to miss anything and I wanted to put her and her needs, for the time, first.

I'm not sitting here judging Cusk as a person, especially since this book is a work of literature and was mostly written after the fact, much of it with a tone of attempting to be darkly humorous or poignant. But the picture of motherhood it painted was not one I was ultimately able to feel at peace with. She talks about the evils of parenthood being visited upon babies, who then perpetuate these same things upon their own children. I got frustrated at her attitude of being a helpless observer, a prisoner. She writes as if utterly isolated from other people (and her own child). As I said, at first I could very strongly identify with her feelings, but I was left at the end of the book as if waiting for a punchline that never came.

Posted by mwashburn at 01:24 PM | Comments (1)

August 24, 2006

Long Overdue Post on Birth, Mysticism, and the music of Tool

Brace yourself, this is gonna be a weird one, but I have to get it off my chest or out of my head or something.

Jogging is always my time to ponder the imponderables, think about mind and body and spirit, and just let my mind wander. Lately I've been jogging while listening to Tool's 10,000 Days. I don't really think I've had a chance to completely absorb and process the whole album, but I do like it a lot better than Lateralus. Lateralus was almost a bit too arty for me, and Days, while lyrically still quite convoluted, is at least musically back on the ground and full of nice, grindy guitars and stuff. Anyway, the thing I like about Tool is that they deal with things that are unseen, unseemly, grisly, dark, frightening, beneath the surface of our everyday lives and personalities, but in an incredibly beautiful way. Sublime, I'd call it. I am always left feeling like there is a lot I'm missing though. I know there are tons and tons of occult/mystic references, and while I have some awareness of what it's all about, I can hardly say I completely comprehend all of it.

Which brings me to the next car on this long, bizarre train of thought. If you do any reading on the occult, Alestair Crowley, those sorts of things, you find that in addition to trying to meet God and make gold from base metals, one of the aims of some of these people throughout history has been to call forth demons/beings from another realm or to animate inanimate things (think Golem-- no, not Tolkien's Gollum, but the Golem of Jewish mysticism). Add to this the conversation I had with my doula, who is really into the story of the Sumerian Goddess Inanna as an allegory of childbirth. This idea that you go to another realm, an underworld of sorts, stripped of everything you have or know, go to your absolute limits, and come back changed/reborn. I really felt that this had happened to me when I gave birth to Lily.

Childbirth, when entered into with eyes open and full presence in the experience, is an absolutely life-altering experience. Bringing forth life is pretty damn powerful, and I am not the same. I've gone through this mourning of who/what I was, and now I'm trying to figure out who this different creature that I have become IS. But back to how this relates to mysticism. At the time Lily was born, all I could think of was Alestair Crowley and his grand ceremonies using shit, blood, semen, etc. to try and call forth life. It all just seems a pale comparison to the experience of childbirth, rife with all those bodily fluids as well as pain and transformation. Is Magick really just men trying to replicate what women go through in childbirth? Some cultures decorate women as warriors after they give birth, but our culture doesn't really acknowledge much at all about the transformation of the mother through this experience; it becomes all about the baby in an instant.

I am wondering if there are other women who experience this transformation the way I have, on such a spiritual level. I suppose it's all just a problem of interpretation. Sure, we all swap "war stories" of how our labor went, what happened during the birth, etc., but to me those conversations lack some deeper element. It's something I can't put into words, but something I just *know* about where I went and what I've been through. It's no wonder that some women are treated for PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) after a particularly difficult/invasive birth experience. All the sort of crunchy stuff about natural birth gets at some of it, in terms of "empowerment," but again, to me there is this lurking darker, more powerful element that I can't describe.

What is my point here? I don't know. I'm just grasping at straws trying to explain something that will in all likelihood remain inexplicable and unable to be captured in words. On a surface level it may come of as sort of birthist, feminist rantings, but I see it as much more personal. But it's something I need to try to explain in order to sort out for myself.

Posted by mwashburn at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2006

Who Am I?

Well, after a year of this whole mommy thing, I feel that I have finally regained some semblance of sanity and selfhood, however fleeting. I don't know when you get to say that you are officially "un-depressed," but I have been off the Zoloft for a full month now, and seem to be feeling pretty good overall. I have my moments, but I was always the angry sort before kids anyway.

I know that I am different in many ways than I was a year or two ago on the inside, and at the same time I'm suddenly struggling with the ways I'm different on the outside. When I start to turn the focus to myself instead of Lily for a minute, I start to see all the ways I'm different than I was. My body is different, my skin is different, my hair is different, I'm a couple of years older. I feel like I just skipped over a whole progression of time and didn't have a chance to adjust. I'm not in my 20s anymore, and for some reason that is a marker to me that something should be stylistically different. I don't feel right in my clothes any more, but at the same time I don't really know what I like, clothing-wise. I don't feel right without makeup, but my old standby of black eyeliner and red lipstick just makes me feel like I'm in drag. It's so odd. I need to get to know this new skin, and figure out what complements it. I'm not saying that I am my wardrobe, I'm just saying that I need a wardrobe. I can't live in jeans and crappy t-shirts, but I don't need to wear dress-up clothes. Can anyone help me?

Posted by mwashburn at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2006

$100 an Hour for THIS??

Well, I saw the new shrink for the second time today. She's actually a Psychologist, not a Therapist or Psychiatrist, and was recommended to me by the nurse practitioner who so gleefuly handed out Zoloft to me like so much penny candy. I've decided I'm not going back. She's useless. Nice, but useless. At the first appointment, she handed me a catalog for motivational audiocassettes, and today her advice basically consisted of "when you're frustrated at 3am because Lily has been screaming for an hour and you just want to yell 'SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT THE HELL UP,' try to replace those thoughts and words with some more positive ones." Well duh. I miss my old therapist. Well, the upshot of today's visit was that I was given permission to give up cloth diapers without guilt. Who needs all that laundry when they're dealing with depression? Planet be damned, I have issues.

Posted by mwashburn at 07:39 PM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2005

How it Goes with Us

Well, Halloween was a bust. It rained, and we had all of one visitor. I did swing by Barnes and Noble yesterday, though, and scored some half price truffles, as well as a pumpkin spice latte.

My mental state is still a bit up and down. I'm not as anxious and angry as I was a couple of weeks ago, but I'm still pretty blue. I feel like I'm constantly moving through a sort of syrupy fog. It takes me a long time to do anything and I'm still prone to bouts of frustrated crying. I was feeling better over the weekend, leading me to think "gee, maybe I wasn't depressed after all," but they tell me it's probably the Zoloft kicking in and the worst thing I can do is stop taking it.

We're working on finding babysitters, though I still don't know if I can trust a stranger with the Bug. We'll have to see. Anxiety over something happening to her is part of this whole thing, but at the same time, a break would be good for my mental health. We're still dealing with sleep issues (and probably will be forever, pretty much). I think the time change kind of messed everyone up, though it does seem that some sort of pattern is emerging.

The good news is that our holiday plans are all set. Sorry to disappoint those of you who may have been waiting for a Thanksgiving invite. The annual kick-ass Thanksgiving hoopla will not be happening this year, as we are headed to New York to see family. The Bug and I will be spending two weeks with Nana at Christmas time, which will be wonderful, since Nana hasn't seen her since she was two weeks old. I think all that family time will be really good for me too, and after I return, it's the new year. I plan to get serious about finding freelance work, among other things.

That's about all the news that's fit to print at the moment.

Posted by mwashburn at 10:58 AM | Comments (2)

October 26, 2005

Zoloft Nation

We watched Prozac Nation the other night, and the movie was just as dull as I remember the book being, but the thing that stuck with me was the main character's paraphrased quote about depression-- that it happens gradually, then all at once. That's how it's been for me. It was like I went for a walk in the snow, and it got deeper and deeper until I was hip-deep in drifts, struggling to move. I realized last week, after nearly throwing the high chair tray across the dining room and sitting sobbing on the bathroom floor that something is very wrong. I finally said out loud what I've said silently to myself many, many times in the last two months: "I need some help."

Postpartum depression is a medical condition, but it doesn't get treated because it feels like a personal failing. I did everything I was supposed to do. I eat right, I exercise. I get out for walks. I have been joining groups, meeting people, socializing. But it didn't stop the walls from closing in on me; the ache of missing friends and family, the irrational anger and frustration, the bouts of crying, the feeling of being trapped, of being not me, of being a terrible mother. It's so hard to admit, when you have this beautiful baby and everyone is smiling at her, that things are not ok, that you can't get over it on your own. People told me that things would get easier when she was 3 months old. Three months came and went, and though some aspects were easier, my lows were lower. "Oh, at four months you'll feel like yourself again." Four months came and went, and now I just want to sleep all day and I just wait for Adam to get home, count the days to the weekend when I can have a break. I don't have the energy to keep pretending everything is ok any more.

I start seeing a therapist in two weeks. In the meantime, I've started taking Zoloft. I have always felt that antidepressants are probably overprescribed, and am still terrified of taking them. But if it helps me get up in the morning and be there for Lily now, not in two months or six months, or whatever, I'm willing to do it because she's worth it.

Why write about this in such a public forum? Well, first of all, I have never been the kind of person who can lie to her friends when they ask "how are you?" so most of you were probably gonna hear about this anyway, and I need your friendship more than ever. Second, as other brave women like Heather Armstrong and Brooke Shields have shown, motherhood is hard, underappreciated, and undersupported in our culture. Postpartum depression can happen to anyone, and it's not a personal failing, not a weakness, and nothing to be ashamed of. Of course, I'm still trying to convince myself of all this. I'll keep you posted.

Posted by mwashburn at 12:09 PM | Comments (4)