How Art Pulled Me Out of Postpartum Depression
And what this newsletter will be
In June 2021, I gave birth to my first child and found myself, after the blur of the newborn weeks had passed, thrown into postpartum depression and the worst anxiety I had ever experienced.
This emotional upheaval is not at all uncommon. According to experts at Massachusetts General Hospital, ten to fifteen percent of birthing people will develop a postpartum psychiatric disorder. These periods of mental change can be deeply disorienting, and it’s not just the birthing person’s emotional state that’s in flux.
Researcher Cat Bohannon has written about the fact that pregnant people’s brains go through physical changes as well, starting in the third trimester and continuing after birth.
In her acclaimed book, Eve, Bohannon writes that a pregnant person’s brain will, "quite reliably, shrink in volume by as much as 5 percent” during this period, “followed by a steady rebuilding during the first few months after giving birth.” Bohannon notes that researchers believe human birthing people may "have evolved to be capable of an extra phase of brain development…a deep pruning that precedes a massive period of social learning.”
Of course, when this was all happening to me, in my brain and body, Bohannon’s book hadn’t yet been published. I wasn’t aware of postpartum depression beyond the term itself. What I was going through felt not like a hormonal condition, but like a fundamental shift in my awareness of mortality, in my ability to sync up emotionally with another being.
Sleep deprived, pulled in a way I’d never experienced before to understand every single thing about my tiny child, the anxiety worsened. I cried. A lot. Worse still, I didn’t know what to do about how I felt. I couldn’t turn to the things that had helped me through difficulty in the past: I didn’t have time to rest or even eat uninterrupted, much less spend long hours talking to friends or writing. I couldn’t run without worrying about disrupting my body’s ability to heal from my unexpected C-section.
As I breastfed all day and was up with my child much of the night, I began checking out art books from my digital library and reading about oil and watercolor painting, plein air pastel work, urban sketching, and so much else.
At first, I just read a lot, and with my body occupied in the many tasks of care that filled my days, tried to look differently at my surroundings. As I observed, I tried to figure out technique. How would I paint or draw that slant of light or the way shadows made up the visual structure of a tree? What was it about any particular object or scene that had captured my attention? How would I, in turn, emphasize that aspect for a viewer?
This limited practice couldn’t last. I had to actually try putting what I was seeing down on a surface. Soon, I was seeking out the nearest art shop whenever I was out with my family, spending every spare penny so that I could discover my own would-be favorite materials. I wanted to draw all the time, and not limit myself to that—but try gouache and watercolor and oils and pastels, too.
This obsession focused my attention on my hands and what they could do, rather than on the blooming chaos of new parenthood. It taught me that looking outside of myself and looking hard—so that I could replicate observed details on the page—could help unstick the internal jams that had left me weepy and floundering for months.
As my child grew, I began to notice the phenomena inside my daily life that recurred, that could anchor me in our ever-changing reality. The locales of our relationship—the couch where I held them during colds and fevers, the floor where I urged them into their first steps, the bed where we lazed and read and nursed—these places became a first canvas, of sorts.
Watching the lights from outside pass over the bedroom walls, I wanted to capture them—the movement, the sense of how quickly both the light itself and the patterns it created, changed. The piece accompanying this post is a representation of that movement. Created using cut paper, oil pastel, and cyanotype preparation fluid, it is an attempt to capture both the brightness and the blues of postpartum.
It is also, now, an emblem of having made it through.
In this newsletter, I hope to track my making as I go, again, through the newborn and infant phases, through the sleeplessness and wonder of new parenthood. I’ve already stockpiled some arts resources to help me through. I’ll be sharing those, too. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.