Everyone has his or her own inspiration and reason for a hobby. Mine was originally to protect myself from
going through postpartum depression.
After my first son was born, darkness swept over me like black cloud. It came out of nowhere, and I didn’t know what was going on or how to fix myself. I suffered for months before I figured out I was fighting postpartum depression. Once I acknowledged the difficulty I was enduring, I sought the help of a professional.
My doctor sent me to see a psychiatrist at a state hospital. It scared me. I wondered if there was something so wrong with me that I had to go to a hospital to see a specialist.
I sat in the waiting room week after week, watching people who I couldn’t compare myself too. Some were talking to themselves, some were walking in circles, some had tics, and a lot of them were staring at me. I didn’t belong there. I just felt a little blue.
I promised myself when I got better, I would never go back to that hospital ever again. It became a fear, and a motivation to protect my mind from falling back into that dark place again. And this same fear plays out in the protagonist mother in Schasm.
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I became pregnant again in 2012 and took a proactive stance against postpartum depression. I started seeing a therapist in a regular office (not the hospital). She suggested finding something to occupy my mind—something that would be just for me. I wasn’t good at that. I lived my life to take care of my family. I stopped thinking about myself when my first son was born. However, with the fear of going through what I went through with my oldest son, I listened to my therapist.
Writing had always taken me away from my current state of mind. That would be my hobby—the hobby that would hopefully prevent me from enduring another fall into postpartum depression. I started writing three months before my second son was born. I continued writing after he was born. Whenever he was sleeping or not screaming from colic, I was writing. It put a bubble around my fragile mind. Writing gave me an escape.
My baby wasn’t sleeping, he was in constant pain, and screamed for over twelve hours a day. The mind breaks I had allowed myself, gave me the stamina and strength to get through a very difficult time as a mother. He suffered with colic until he was nine months old, and the week I noticed his screaming had stopped, I looked at myself in the mirror and told myself I had overcome something huge. And I owed it all to my writing. By the time he stopped crying, I had finished writing my second novel. I was proud of myself. I was a better woman, a better wife, and a better mother.
I took my experiences from postpartum depression and put them into a fictional story. The story turned into something much bigger than a mother with postpartum depression. But in any case, the story was my saving grace.
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