Unravel into Darkness
This is a thread of my story. A story woven through the dark places where I found my way within.
“Postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, what get clumped into perinatal mood disorders, is a normal and healthy response to a dysfunctional way of life. So it’s normal and healthy and functioning that we would feel depressed to be home alone with our children 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, or more. It’s normal to feel anxiety when we don’t have any support outside our nuclear family ”
reflection
I have fragmented drafts, books full of journaling, dreams, and illustrations from the past three years. I wonder how to start?
What’s my intention?
How do I want people to feel?
I know I want to share what I’ve learned. How the Hawaiian lands and culture helped me find the language for what I was feeling and a new way of being in this world.
Feeling.
Listening.
Loving.
How I realized the power of belief, uncovered my own connection to earth-based wisdom, and developed a relationship with the land. How all these things wove threads to my inner knowing. But I can’t start there. And I think that’s why I’m hesitant. The real beginning of this story is dark, and our culture doesn’t appreciate the dark places.
Let’s keep our emotions under control.
Let’s not talk about that —especially to people you don’t know.
You’re good now —let’s move on.
You have a lot to be grateful for.
Be positive.
Smile.
When I say those words now, I know they’re not true. Sure, it’s important to feel good and share that joy, but it’s vital to honour when you don’t feel good. Instead of brushing it away or burying it down, move through it —feel it.
Why is it there?
What is it telling you?
What does it have to teach you?
Trust that leaning into that pain will take you somewhere.
But still, as I write this, I have fear about how it will be received. My instinct is to brush over what might make someone uncomfortable. But that’s not who I’m writing this for. I’m writing because there is power in story. This story is for the person that will find medicine somewhere between the lines. Just like I found so much medicine in story. This is for the person who will be touched by these words, even the uncomfortable ones, even the dark ones —especially the dark ones. And maybe that person will be the person who starts off feeling a little uncomfortable.
When I was a teenager, I started to collect books of old fables, fairy tales, and myths. I read almost none of them, but something inside of me was drawn to them. My unconscious self knew they contained knowledge and lessons for life, but I didn’t understand how to decode the wisdom. So they sat on my shelf, and then they got packed up and left in storage while I journeyed through life —fumbling along. I’ve since discovered some tools to help uncover the hidden gems in these ancient stories, and I employ you (if you haven’t already) to dig a little deeper into a story that catches your own interest. Last year, I bought the book, If Woman Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie, but like many books I buy, they don’t get read right away. Life with two little kids, a husband writing a master’s thesis, and a global pandemic that segregates us from our support networks, doesn’t lend much time for reading my piles of books. A few months ago, I bought another copy of the book on Audible and started to listen. Sharon expresses the need for women to share stories and uncover messages in the old stories. She wrote so beautifully all that I had been feeling, and in that moment, I felt so seen by the universe. So, this is not just my story. There are many, it might be yours, or it might be someone that you know, and the more we share, the easier it will be to harness the power from these dark places.
the dark
Do you know the ancient Greek story of Demeter and her daughter Kore? As with all old stories, there are many versions, and it has been told from many different perspectives. Messages and lessons evolving through time depending on the audience and the culture.
Often seen as a story of the seasons, it’s a reminder of our cyclical nature but also a story that honours the importance of the dark, the underworld, the winter, the places where we need to go to learn about the power we have within, the power we have to transform, the power we have to grow.
In short, Demeter, goddess of life and nature, and her daughter Kore bless the land with growth, until one day Kore, curious about the place where flowers and plants come from, ascends down a stairway under the earth. The way back becomes covered with dark earth, and she is now trapped with Hades, King of the underworld, and the spirits of the dead. She is afraid, worried that she will never again see her mother or the land and all its flowers. When all seems hopeless, she eats the pomegranate seeds Hades offered, which binds her to the underworld for eternity. At that moment of surrender, her right of passage, Kore becomes enchanted with the underworld, feels akin to the souls ready to be rebirthed. The maiden Kore takes her place as Persephone, queen of the underworld.
Meanwhile, Kore’s mother, Demeter, is on her own journey through darkness. She wanders the lands looking for her beloved daughter. In her devastation, she cannot eat or sleep and vows that there will be no growth in the lands until she can find her daughter. As Demeter falls deeper into despair, she becomes unrecognizable. The once fertile land turns to decay, and the harvests fail. Consumed with hopelessness, she rests in Eleusis, where her temple stands. The crone goddess Baubo comes to comfort what she sees as a mournful traveler and brings her to her home to offer food and drink. Demeter’s melancholy holds until Baubo dances, sings, and cheekily lifts her skirt. Demeter laughs, revealing her divine self once again. This connection to Baubo gives Demeter inspiration to harness her power within, feel joy, and change her perception. She stands, feeling whole again, ready to find her daughter.
I am all the goddesses in this story, and so are you. At different points in our life, we can all find ourselves here. Maiden. Mother. Crone. Our own rights of passage. Our transformations. Our rebirths.
My story begins in the dark, an underworld, a place where I didn’t want to go, where everything felt painful, loud, and hopeless. When I emerged, nothing was the same, especially me, and now I see this experience as one of my most valuable.
Shortly after the birth of my second child, I moved with my husband, 3-year-old son, and new babe from our home in Vancouver, British Columbia, to beautiful sunny Honolulu, Hawaii. He had a full scholarship for graduate studies in Japanese history at the University of Hawaii. It was going to be an adventure and a catalyst for the change we had desired for many years. We felt stuck in our little heritage basement suite rental. I was unfulfilled at work. Peter and I were parenting and living on opposite schedules. We never saw each other. We desired more flexibility and more family time. Moving to Hawaii might not have been the answer to all our desires, but —if you want something to change, something has to change. It was change.
My underworld in this story came in the form of “postpartum depression”. I now believe this mental health condition is more of a broken culture condition. What I really experienced was a normal reaction to a lack of support and community in my world. My body was screaming at me to change. This is not ok! Something is wrong! I had gone through my entire life ignoring my body, going against my natural cycles, being labeled as “dramatic”, “emotional”, or “sensitive”, and was reminded time and time again that “nothing was wrong”. The language of my body was something I was conditioned to discredit. I understand now that anxiety, fear, discomfort, and sometimes even illness is my body’s way of communicating that life is out of alignment. As I reflect on this, I can see that many of the health “problems” throughout my life were actually just my body telling me to wake the fuck up and change something.
This is what I know now. We are disconnected from the remembrance of our basic physiological needs as social mammals.
We need connection.
We need to be supported by many.
We need community.
Community, what does that even mean? I had no idea until I saw a little reflection of what a healthy community actually looked like in Hawaii.
And yeah, I get the irony of consciously moving to a new country, an island, away from everything and everyone we knew, but had I felt supported in the first place, really supported and connected, we most likely wouldn’t have left. And that also doesn’t mean some support wasn’t there; I just couldn’t feel it.
From the beginning, paradise didn’t seem like paradise to me. My lens was already layered with anxiety and stress, ignited long before the move. My whole pregnancy, I was consumed with worry and pain. I left work early on medical leave, saw many doctors, and midwives, and specialists, only to be told nothing was actually wrong. Some support from family was available, but it seemed to just keep us from tipping right off the edge. When my midwife asked if I had support, I just cried and cried and cried. What I truly needed was so much more. I had no idea, though, so I never asked. Looking back, there were lots of signs, but they were filtered by lots of distractions. Peter was working part-time and did graduate studies courses at the University of British Columbia. We awaited replies for his master’s programs to decide what school he’d attend and where we would move. I created and published a book —no two books. Moving to a different country meant we had to get married for our visa, we had to pack a house we’d lived in for ten years. And, of course, we already had a toddler, who, during my medical leave, I took care of because “nothing was actually wrong”. And then we moved to an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where we knew no one. What could be wrong? I was fine.
Peter went ahead to Honolulu in early August 2018 to set things up. My flight with the kids was scheduled a few weeks later but was delayed due to Hurricane Lane, a category five tropical cyclone with record-breaking rain and winds. I wonder now if that was the wind warning me of what was to come; Mother Earth saying, “Come child. I will shake you up. Take you places you’ve never been. You will feel!”. Not a day went by when I didn’t feel her wind on my skin. Even on the sunniest days, it whipped through the open windows of our bright white condo, reminding me to feel.
I will skip many details of the next year because it doesn’t matter what the circumstances were. The hard stuff was real. Our new life in Honolulu was a drastic shift from what I was used to in Vancouver; we missed the walkability, the community centers, the playgroups, and the other moms on maternity leave breastfeeding their babies in the park. The ways in which I found community and support were nonexistent now. Maybe I could have cultivated what I needed had I seen things differently, or if I had previous examples of building supportive communities —had my perception been different —had I been connected within. I wasn’t connected to anything, especially not myself. Here’s where I could hear that voice on repeat in my head.
Write a gratitude journal.
You should be happy about this, and this, and this.
Why aren’t you happy about that?
Why aren’t you grateful?
Well, fuck that. When your life feels so overwhelming that you’re fraught with anxiety within 5 minutes of getting out of bed, a Crone goddess can’t snap you out of it by reminding you the sun is shining, or that you are breathing, or of your beautiful family. I needed something from deep, deep, deep inside, and the only way to get there was —through. I needed to be reminded of my core, my connection within. Nothing on the outside could have helped. I needed to find the nourishing pomegranate seeds in this mess of life to transform my being from a lost, hopeless maiden to a queen.
Here’s an unedited excerpt from my journal from December 8, 2018. We had been in Hawaii for just over two months. Lennin was almost four and Bjorn about nine months. I hadn’t slept much for nearly two years. Bjorn cried a lot. I cried a lot.
I hate being a mom of two kids. I feel torn apart into a thousand useless pieces. No one is ever happy —satisfied. Especially not me. I had these great ideas about being a mom. I thought I’d be a natural —and maybe I was a bit. Things were very different with Lennin. Although it was hard, and I felt like I went through a personal journey to discover a new identity as a mom, I thought I did a pretty good job. I felt confident. Maybe not at every corner, but when I was challenged, I thought things through, and Peter and I worked together to solve whatever it was. There’s none of that now. I feel lost. Anxious. Exhausted. Overwhelmed. Defeated. Hopeless. I think I did go through something similar with Lennin personally, but I never felt like I was doing a bad job as a mom. Now I do. I guess I have for a year now, but it seems to be getting worse and worse. I’m using all the tools I found to find balance last time. Iron supplements, meditation, yoga but I’m honestly not sure any of that will help. I need to be more people to meet the demands of these kids together. Sleep might help —at least for my ability to react better and just generally getting to the end of the day without losing control of myself. Feeling so frustrated. Sad. Nothing I do is good enough.
It did get worse after that. Through my journal entries, I can see that I always tried to spin things into positivity, but my memories hold the truth. Not necessarily the truth of what was happening but certainly the truth of how I felt. My perception at the time. I remember how my body started convulsing with rage in the morning when the kids asked me things while I was getting ready. How I would look at them throughout the day and wonder why they were so cruel, why they were attacking me, why wouldn’t they just stop talking or screaming or crying? How my body would get so tense that I couldn’t even take them to school. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t make dinner. I couldn’t move. I remember Peter saying that it wasn’t normal. No, I agreed. It is not normal.
I remember wondering why no one told me having two kids would be so hard. Wondering why anyone would choose to do this? But no one wants to hear about the dark places, and when you say it out loud, no one wants to believe you are there. It’s too hard. Too scary. They say (and I say to myself).
Can’t you just see how beautiful everything is?
Your kids are so helpful, so full of joy, it’s so warm and sunny.
What a lovely experience you are having.
It’s Spring! The air, salty and floral.
No one wants to accept that both things are true; you can be in an underworld and in paradise. No one, especially not myself.
I remember sitting on the floor of my kitchen one beautiful day in early April 2019, hugging my knees to my chest, screaming. Bjorn was on the other side of the childproof gate crying, his face red and his eyes wide. It was just past his first birthday. I remember thinking, what does he want from me? Nothing I do is good enough. Nothing I do will make him happy. I thought about how I understood how moms leave their kids. I thought if I had somewhere to go, maybe I’d leave too.
Later that day I called the mental health department at our doctor's office. A woman evaluated me and scheduled an appointment. In Canada, I would have seen my naturopath first and talked about sleep and lifestyle, connection, and support, but here I was immediately directed to a Psychiatrist.
During my appointment, the doctor asked me fewer questions than I was asked on the phone. He explained the difference between anxiety and depression, which I’ll paraphrase down to anxiety being about fear and depression about hopelessness. And he described a bit about the nervous system, which I was already familiar with. The sympathetic nervous system (flight or fight) is when your body perceives danger, and the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) makes us feel content and relaxed. Essentially we still have the same biology as our ancestors, who evolved to switch to the sympathetic state when enduring high-stress situations, like running from a bear, but we are only meant to sit in that state for very short periods of time. In today’s society, we endure many stresses constantly, so our bodies' physiological need to rest and recover isn’t being met most of the time. The repetition of a perceived threat creates deep neurological pathways, and soon everything starts to feel like a bear attack.
The psychiatrist said that even though I self-described as anxious, I was actually depressed. All my experiences were being directed to the flight or fight response in my brain. In order for my responses to stress to feel less extreme and enable my brain to create new pathways, he recommended an antidepressant and sent me along my way.
That experience made me feel quite uncomfortable and solidified my already haunting depiction of prescription drug use and the numbing of society. I was most disturbed by the questions that I wasn’t asked.
Was I still breastfeeding? — I was.
Did I have support or friends? —I did not.
Did I have any alone time? —I did not.
What was my diet like? —Not great.
Did I exercise? —Nope.
Did I have community? —I did not.
At that moment, I was Kore, hopelessly stuck in the realm of the dead, missing her mother. I was Demeter lost in the decay, wandering aimlessly, unable to access her will to go on. I grappled with my discomfort. I worried that if I took the drugs, I wouldn’t feel anything anymore. I worried that I might need them forever. Mostly, I worried that I had ruined the connection with my children. In the end, I realized I had no support, no working tools, and the place from where I had been viewing my life for the past few months was disturbing. My pomegranate seed, my witty goddess crone, came as a middle-aged man, handing me a pill.
I recently heard this beautiful analogy by Rachelle Garcia Seliga, founder of Innate Traditions: When a flower is wilting in a garden, we do not blame the flower. We look at the environment in which it grows and tend to that environment to help it thrive. She also speaks about the less recognized part of our nervous system, our social system that looks to other humans to co-regulate and mirror. The system that in times of stress looks to the people around us for support, which is why isolation can be so detrimental to overall health.
There’s a part of me that wishes that thread of my story was different; that instead, I was strong enough to get out myself, or with one of the magical tools I’d found in the years after, but that wasn’t my truth. Sometimes you are handed something in life that you don’t quite like —but it will get you to where you need to go.
rebirth
When I emerged from my underworld, all of a sudden, I felt connected with everything. I am everything. I felt energy moving in and out of my body. I felt my feet on the ground, the wind on my skin, and the heat of the sun. I felt it, but I also felt a part of it. I could feel my heartbeat; maybe I could feel everyone’s heartbeat? I remember telling my mom that I felt like my capacity to feel had expanded infinitely.
Before, I was bound by layers covering my vision and senses; I could see fragments, but nothing held my attention. I could only care, or even see, what was in my immediate sphere, and usually, that didn’t expand past my own body. Once the layers unfolded, I could see it all, I could feel it all, and had no idea how to talk about it or what to do with it. Only one word in my narrow view of the world came to mind. Crazy.
Crazy as it may be, synchronicities led me down a very interesting path during the year to follow. Another spring to spring cycle. A path led by my desire to harness my intuition so that I could remain confident and balanced and to find a way to explain what this energy was, pulsing through my being.
What happened to me after felt indescribable. I sometimes questioned if it was real or just the drugs, but I realized the drugs just helped dissolve what was blocking my ability to feel. They unravelled the layers of anxiety that were keeping me from feeling love. They created the space to help me build new neurological pathways. Although they were important in my recovery, I was determined not to let them do all the work. Once I felt connected back to myself, I made the intention to learn everything I could about emotion and intuition. I wanted all the tools so that I would never disconnect from myself and the world in that way again.
Demeter and Persephone eventually have a blissful reuniting, gracing the land with new growth every year. For half the year, Persephone tends to the spirits of the underworld until those seeds are ready to be birthed. Then she walks the Spring soil with her mother, Demeter. Together they nurture that which buds through the warming soil of Spring.
Stepping out from the underworld and finding my power within. This is the point where I originally wanted my story to begin. Emerging from the dark, unravelling old perspectives, the new, the connected, the space in which I look at the world, and my family, with curiosity and admiration. This is the part of the story we as a culture are happy to hear about, the turning point, the transformation, where buds emerge out of the cold ground, and birds sing a pretty tune. But without the pain, none of what came next would have happened. I would have never realized how disconnected I had been, how detached, how apathetic, how much I didn’t feel. It wasn’t in an instance that I felt this struggle turn to power, but the veil was lifted, and nothing in my life actually needed to change to get where I am today, except my perception. A new path of connection. A connection within. A connection to everything. ◊
In my next story, (which is still not written) I describe, following synchronicities and the people that took me too, deepening into intuition, and what I learnt from Hawaiian culture and other earth honouring cultures from my own lineages and how ritual and viewing life as sacred shifted me once again.
As a result of my intention to connect to my intuition and find a language for the connection I felt, I found Reconnected Parenting, in the Spring of 2020. The supportive online community became significant for me when we were isolated from our local community. Through the breathwork offered in the program, I deepened my understanding of the nervous system and my emotions and was able to tap into the infinite wisdom and connection, I had felt after the evil of my PPD lifted.
If you're curious about my statements about postpartum depression being a reaction to a disconnected society, or about the social nervous system, I invite you to listen to Rachelle Garcia Seliga founder of Innate Traditions on the Belonging Podcast or Mythic Medicine Podcast.
The first chapter of Sharon Blackie’s, If Women Rose Rooted is available here.
