Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Postpartum Edition)

Submitted for the approval of the Midnight (Mamas) Society, I call this story: What I Did in the Shadows.

My motherhood journey started in pure survival mode almost seven years ago. Between my own birth trauma, the NICU, and trying to survive a global pandemic (while working full-time from home, in lockdown, with a newborn), it felt like I was living minute to minute, just trying to keep my head above water.

One night, I sat awake, rocking my Velcro baby in the dark of his nursery. There was a specific, heavy kind of silence that only exists at 3:00 AM—the kind that makes you wonder if the sun is ever going to come back up, and leaves you feeling like the only mom in the world awake and crying. I was desperate to turn my brain off, but I didn’t have the energy for anything complicated. I needed something silent, one-handed (literally just my thumb), and simple enough to process through that particular brand of newborn exhaustion.

I landed on a random digital mandala painting app and downloaded it on a whim.

Instead of falling into an hours-long doomscroll to temporarily numb my anxious mind, I started making little kaleidoscopes of color in 10-minute bursts. It became my anchor. A tiny, glowing campfire in the middle of a very long, very dark night.

The contrast was jarring. Just a few years earlier, I was in fashion school, sketching twenty croquis a day, surrounded by Very Creative People™ doing Very Creative Things™. Now, I couldn’t even draw a stick figure. When I realized my creative life had vanished, it felt like a sudden, soul-crushing death. I had lost the only thing that was completely mine, and I had no idea how to get it back.

As a multiply-disabled parent with complex chronic illnesses, most mainstream postpartum advice felt like it was written for parents living on another planet. It didn’t fit my reality...At. All. I stopped trying to force it. I just focused on whatever made me feel even a fraction of a percent better than the minute before.

Slowly, the minutes turned into hours, then days, weeks, and months. The heavy pull of the black hole I’d been stuck in finally started to lose its grip. My black-and-white world started to bloom with color again. I’ve intentionally sat down to create ever since—a style that is purposefully quick, actively anti-obsessive about perfection, and just beautifully imperfect.

This time of year always brings me back to that shift. We are approaching Lammas. For those who aren't familiar, it's a traditional pagan festival marking the very first harvest of the season—the halfway point between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. Historically, it was about gathering the first grain to ensure you’d survive the coming winter. But symbolically, it’s a time to acknowledge what has ripened and grown in our own lives, often despite grueling heat, unpredictable storms, and less-than-ideal conditions (my blueberry bushes can attest to that learning curve).

Looking back, those digital mandalas were my first harvest. I was scraping together a DIY art practice out of pure necessity. I couldn’t have known it then, but it was exactly what I needed to survive the season I was living through. This year, Lammas feels like an invitation to honor the quiet embers of hope we tend to—a reminder that it is possible to grow something beautiful in the shadows.

For a long time, I was the Queen of Intellectualization. I leaned into my education and professional background, taking small moments that could have been used to get used to the discomfort of silence, instead opting to "talk shop" during sessions, I became very adept at avoiding feeling my feelings. I learned to warp myself into a mirror of a mirror, reflecting my therapists' own professional interests to keep the sessions comfortable. I analyzed the who, what, where, when, why, and how of my trauma so efficiently that I could float through sessions on complete autopilot, getting an "A" while staying entirely disconnected from my own body. Once it finally dawned on me that this was unintentional manipulation disguised as self-protection, I was angry. I wasted so much time hovering around the light at the end of a tunnel I’d been stuck in my whole life. And for what? The low low price of hundreds if not thousands of dollars and ending up right back where I started.

So, I finally took the leap and reached out to an art-based trauma therapist. Making that first appointment was terrifying—like stepping out from behind the curtain into the light—but it was the best decision I’ve ever made. I didn't have the energy to keep up the charade anymore. I was so deeply burned out. Achingly tired. I started viewing every time I left my house, every time I didn’t cancel or decline invitations, successes.

I let my guard down enough to become a witness to my own truths. I spoke things out loud that I had never spoken before. I sat with the parts of myself that had been purposefully or painfully taken from me, or hidden by me. I began to do the deeply difficult work of real therapy. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. I nearly quit many times; I was very near hospitalization at some points—but I committed to making healing a part of my life. Like regular oil changes: a little bit inconvenient and often messy, but necessary maintenance for the soul.

So, when I have the privilege of talking with newer moms, and they ask how to survive those first months and years of motherhood, I offer this little bit of advice based on my own personal lived experience.

Be as gentle with yourself as you are your baby. You're both new to this. Remind yourself that things don't have to be perfect to start nurturing those tiny embers of yourself back to life, prepping for your own harvest.

Sometimes, finding your way back to yourself just starts with your thumb, a cracked phone screen, and the courageous act of deciding to feel a fraction of a percent better than you did an hour ago.