As we come to the end of Mental Health Awareness Month (May), I wanted to share my personal experience with mental health struggles during my pregnancy.

As most of you know, all the articles on the Peach and Flora platform are written anonymously by various women who wish to share their experiences, stories or views on certain topics. For this topic, however, I thought that it would be helpful (maybe even crucial) for me to disclose that it is written by me, Violet, the Chief Editor at Peach and Flora. Why? Because it is important that every woman who experiences mental health struggles during and after pregnancy to know that they are not alone. I’m putting a face and a name to this article so that you understand that it can happen to anyone and that it is more common than you think. I want you to know that I see you, I understand you, and I sympathize with you because I too have experienced mental health struggles during my pregnancy.

To give you a little perspective, I’ll start by saying that I’ve always been a very optimistic and confident person throughout my life. Even when I’ve had bad days, I’ve always been that person that would quickly bounce back from negativity because I would choose to focus on the best way forward and how to overcome the challenges that I faced. I had heard people talking about severe depression but it was kind of a foreign concept to me because my version of depression was having a bad day or a bad week which would eventually turn back around.

Fast forward to June 2021 when my partner and I decided to try to conceive a child. The excitement was so real! We were both over the moon and we kept dreaming about what the experience would be like, where we wanted to have the baby, and so on. It took us a few months, but when I found out I was pregnant the word “excited” doesn’t even encompass how I felt. I was beyond ecstatic about my pregnancy.

Two months into my pregnancy I started feeling like a dark cloud was slowly moving over me. I felt a weird type of sadness come over me but I couldn’t understand or explain why. By the third month of my pregnancy, the dark cloud felt like it was hanging over me every single day and I just couldn’t shake it. I felt a deep feeling of constant sadness and, for the first time in my life, I knew that I was experiencing depression and anxiety.

It became so bad that I didn’t even feel like I had anything in life to look forward to. I, the very optimistic person who was always dreaming about the amazing future in store for me, could no longer feel a sense of hope or excitement for the future. Instead, I felt paralyzed, stuck, and unhappy. My anxiety shot through the roof and it honestly scared me. I was so anxious that I couldn’t bear to look at the light coming from my phone screen because it triggered me and gave me heart palpitations and a headache. As a result, I had to reduce my screen light to the lowest setting. I also had to keep my phone on silent (without even the vibrate feature) because the sound of my phone ringing also heightened my anxiety.

My thoughts were dark and heavy and, together with the intense early pregnancy symptoms, it was an all round tough time for me. I was miserable and I found myself waking up in the middle of the night to cry.

Towards the end of my third month of pregnancy, I decided that I needed to get help because I knew that I wasn’t okay. I told a few of my friends and family that I needed to see a therapist and a mutual acquaintance referred me to a therapist that she was seeing. I started seeing this therapist and I downloaded a spiritual meditation app that I would use to read inspirational scriptures and to meditate. I have never been a person that meditates but I found that using the app to guide me to meditate first thing in the morning and sometimes at night before I slept helped me a little bit.

Honestly speaking, my prenatal depression lasted almost the entirety of my pregnancy though there were times that it was worse than others. Months two to six were definitely the hardest for me but, at month seven, it seemed to get a little easier. Though by the time I got to the end of month eight, it got worse again – probably because I was also anxious about the birth of my little one and what the process would be like.

The third trimester of my pregnancy felt foggy. I felt like a zombie that was constantly tired and in a daze of confusion and depression wrapped around each other. I also had a deep fear that, if I already had prenatal depression, what would my postpartum experience be like?

The good news is that after I gave birth (at around 5 days postpartum), I started feeling much better. I was actually shocked! I got a lot of my energy back and I felt happier. Even though I still experienced postpartum anxiety, I was lucky to not experience postpartum depression, but there was a point at around 5 months postpartum where I did experience a tougher time emotionally and my anxiety was through the roof while leaving me feeling very fatigued and overwhelmed. However, for the most part, my postpartum experience has been a good one.

Looking back at my journey, the advice I would give any mother going through prenatal or postpartum depression is, if you can, surround yourself with a few people who will be your rock and your support system. This made all the difference for me. The times where I was alone and in my thoughts were the hardest, but when I had the right (the key word here is “right”) people around me who went above and beyond to make my experience easier and take care of me, I felt much more at peace. During this time I was able to recognize which people brought more anxious energy around me and which ones made me feel more peaceful, secure, and taken care of.

I would also encourage mothers and mothers to be to talk to people that they trust and to seek out professional help. I will be honest and say that the first therapist that I was originally referred to was not helpful to me and we didn’t really seem to hit it off. Later on I found another counselor that I seemed to really connect with and I was never afraid to ask my friends and family for help or to tell the people around me that I was not fine. I think that being vulnerable and letting people know that I was not okay helped me to accept how I was feeling and try to find a way to feel better again.

There is no magic potion that ended the depression for me. Rather, I had to take everything one day at a time while continuing to talk to my loved ones and be honest and open about what I was feeling and what I needed help with. After months of feeling like I was swallowed by darkness, one day I woke up and I started seeing glimpses of light in my life. For me, that was the day when I took my newborn home from the hospital. I don’t know why, but everything turned around me for me that day and I began to experience hope and happiness again. But I also had a great support system that I will never, ever forget because it made all the difference to me.

I want to encourage us as women to be there for each other. To check on one another. To show our friends grace when they might be acting differently than they used to. People are fighting their inner battles that we might not know anything about so let’s extend kindness to the people around us.

I want to thank the women that held me down during my pregnancy because that was one of the toughest times of my life. I will never forget the kindness that was extended to me.