Babes in Bookland: Your Women's Memoir Podcast
Women have always written extraordinary memoirs. We just haven't always talked about them loudly enough — until now. Babes in Bookland is a podcast dedicated entirely to memoirs by women, for women who are hungry for honest storytelling, big feelings, and real lives on the page. Each episode is part book discussion, part cultural conversation, and entirely unapologetic about centering women's experiences. Think of us as your most well-read friend who always knows exactly which book you need next.
Babes in Bookland: Your Women's Memoir Podcast
AUTHOR CHAT: Ayana Lage's "Missing Me"
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Author Ayana Lage joins the show to talk about Missing Me, her memoir of postpartum psychosis and the long road back.
We talk about perfectionism as a coping strategy, anxiety as a lifelong undercurrent, and the exhausting need to be seen as “good” while feeling like you’re failing inside. Ayana shares how she turned hospital journals and medical records into a tightly crafted, nonlinear memoir, how she handled the fear of reviews, and what it means to tell the truth when your story includes your partner and your parents. We also get honest about how faith can comfort you and still leave you carrying guilt when mental health doesn’t improve, and why therapy and medication are not character flaws.
Then we widen the lens to the realities that raise the stakes: Black maternal health disparities, being dismissed in medical settings, and why support like a doula can matter. We clarify what postpartum psychosis can look like, why it’s different from postpartum depression or postpartum OCD, and how stigma harms mothers, babies, and families when people don’t know the signs. Ayana closes with the aftermath: releasing shame, planning a second pregnancy with care, making feeding choices without guilt, and finding joy in the mundane.
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Xx, Alex
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Welcome And Introducing Missing Me
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Babes in Bookland, your women's memoir podcast. I'm your host, Alex Franca. Today I'm sitting down with Ayana Lage to discuss her memoir, Missing Me, a memoir of postpartum psychosis and the long road back. It's the story of her postpartum psychosis, yes, but it is so much more than that. It's about the pressures of perfectionism, anxiety, self-criticism, and what it looks like to finally stop shrinking yourself and accepting yourself instead. If you'd like to further support the show, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon for exclusive bonus content. You can also grab some cute merch from our store at TeePublic. Thanks for being here.
SPEAKER_01I'm good. How are you?
SPEAKER_00I'm doing great. Happy pub day, by the way. How are you feeling?
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Um I feel like every emotion possible. Both, you know, excitement that this has finally kind of come to fruition and fear that people won't like it and you know that it won't sell in all the things that you think as an author. Um, but mostly I'm grateful, I would say.
SPEAKER_00I've had a couple of authors liken it to childbirth and you've experienced that. Do you feel like that's a really good comparison?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, honestly, this may be more agonizing. Labor and delivery was difficult, but it was very short in comparison. So yes, I definitely feel the comparison there.
SPEAKER_00I think your memoir is gonna do really well because I couldn't put it down. It's under 200 pages, but you pack in so much, so much. I think it might be one of the best examples of less is more in memoir than I've ever seen. And I just commend you for trusting yourself in your story and the way that you told it and not having all this weird filler in. And what I assume to be merely a memoir about your experience with postpartum psychosis is about so much more. The pressures we all feel and we all face in varying degrees. It's a reckoning with faith, with blame, with medication, with mental health, with motherhood. It's honest, vulnerable, searing. It's funny. It exposes harsh truths and you cite your sources. And ultimately, it's about letting go of the need to be perfect, about piecing yourself back together, and about realizing that you deserve to be pieced back together.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Alex. You sold it just now better than I ever could. Oh, well, thank you.
From Online Writing To Memoir
SPEAKER_00I mean, really, I I think your memoir is incredible and I think it is going to be so relatable to so many people. Thank you. Thank you for putting it out there. Okay, so before we dive into your memoir, let's talk about the process. So you have shared your life and your story online for how many years?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, a long, a long time. More than a decade, I would say, yeah.
SPEAKER_00What was it like though to sit down and realize, all right, I want to tell this story in memoir form?
SPEAKER_01So I always say that I had a unique experience, I feel like, as an author. And that my agent came to me and was like emailed me kind of cold calling almost to say, like, hey, I think that you could write a book. And I was like, No, I don't want to do that. So I didn't, I didn't set out to write memoir. I didn't set out to write a book. Like that until I got that email wasn't even on my radar. Okay. So once she kind of made that that call or that introduction, I kind of started to think, okay, if I did write a book, just hypothetically, like what would it be about? So the psychosis was obviously like at the forefront of my mind. I mean, it's the biggest thing in many ways that has ever happened to me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But I wasn't, I still wasn't quite sure like what will that look like. Do I want to put that out there? You know, that that's also a question to have. So I definitely wrestled with a lot, but um, once I sat down and started to actually like work on a proposal, I was like, this is what I want to do. From there, it just kind of like all spilled out for better or for worse.
SPEAKER_00You craft it so well too. You take various things, you have journal entries, the journal from when you were going through postpartum psychosis, medical records, past experiences. It's not necessarily chronological. I mean, it still sort of is, but you go back and forth a lot. So, how did you how did you come to decide on on that formatting? I mean, it works so well. How do you even think to do that?
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Something that I've realized as I was looking at my life and looking at kind of my book proposal template was that like all of the things that led me to psychosis, it caught the story was kind of woven together in a way that I didn't expect it to be. You know, like in the book, I talk about like growing up in a very Pentecostal home and like longing to hear the voice of God, and then kind of contrast that against psychosis, where I was suddenly hearing God all the time. So I I kind of found those parallels of like, oh, like these things that happened to me in psychosis kind of call back to other things that I've experienced and lived through. So from there, I kind of was like, okay, like I don't necessarily want to just tell a book where it's like this happened and then this happened and then that happened. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was like, maybe it'd be more interesting if we change it up a little bit.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So my editor was phenomenal with that because I feel like in early drafts of the book, it was honestly kind of confusing all of the time jumps. So I kind of had to like rate it in a little bit, do it in a way that like wasn't overindulgent, for lack of a better word.
SPEAKER_00Okay, yeah, sure. So you credit your editor a bit. And do you did you have like a writing coach or a person that you turned to to help you craft memoir specifically? Or were you able to just kind of lean into your own work ethic and just kind of write? I mean, you've been writing for a long time. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So yes, I did work with an author who'd written her own memoir in the sense of like I was already writing the book and wanted feedback from someone. But the interesting thing about that process was that the feedback that I needed, I feel like, was like validation that I was an okay writer or a good writer and that the book was going to be not terrible. She even told me, she's like, because I was like, I will pay you to teach me how to write better. And she said, Anna, you don't need me. I was like, wait a minute, like that's crazy. I definitely do need you. But so we worked together a little bit and she kind of gave me feedback on narrative and my use of past and present tense and all of that. Um, so I worked with her for a couple of chapters, but overall I think that what was the biggest struggle was like my level of confidence in the work and kind of finding it in me to be proud of what I was doing.
SPEAKER_00How do you think that you finally did that then? How did you turn off that critical eye or just did you just write through it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, make it till you make it. I mean, even now, um I still struggle. Um, like I cut myself off from looking at reviews. But yeah, when I was looking at reviews, I'd get in my head about what people did and didn't like and all of that. So, like for me, it's like a constant battle. But as far as writing the book, I just had to, I literally had to tell myself, like, okay, I've got a contract with a publisher. I've got to put the book together and it has to be something that I'm at least a little bit proud of, regardless of whether or not I think that I'm good at this. Like, I have to at least try.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So that was weirdly helpful to me.
SPEAKER_00Did your husband read it or various drafts of it? He was that helpful? Or were you like, no, you love me. You have to tell me I'm a good writer.
SPEAKER_01Well, so I did have him read it very early on, mainly because I mean, as you know, having read the book, I do talk about him a fair amount. Yeah. He is a more private person compared to me, and I didn't want to include anything or look at any like anecdotes or scenarios that he would have felt uncomfortable sharing with the world. So I first presented it to him as kind of like a oh, like this is what I've got. Like, let me know if I need to cut anything. And he he was fine, he didn't want me to cut anything. But um, yes, he read it when it was not very much of anything and um gave me feedback, which I appreciated.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting, right? Our truths coincide with other people's experiences and truths too. And that's that I think that's always a big question I have with some of the memoirs that I read. I'm like, ooh, did this person know you were gonna say this? I didn't really have that in yours.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I always have the same thought too. And I feel like even now, like I'm so nervous for my parents to read it. And it's not like I say anything bad, but it's just like it's easier for me to put myself out there to strangers than it is to the people closest to me. You know, I'm like, what are they gonna think? People who actually lived through this with me, like, how are they going to like what are their thoughts on my retelling of it? Um, so yeah.
SPEAKER_00Is this the in most detail that you've ever shared your experience? Are there gonna be things about what you were feeling and thinking that will surprise your parents or the people closest to you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, even my husband, who um I think thought that he knew all of it. There was a decent amount of of material that I had honestly blocked out.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And it was only going through my journals from the hospital and the hospital records that I kind of had moments of like, oh yeah, that did happen. And that was weird. Yeah.
Memory Gaps Privacy And Loved Ones
SPEAKER_00Well, let's talk about that. Going through this difficult thing that you talked about blocking out and not necessarily remembering, which I feel like is something that a brain would do to protect itself after psychosis, right?
SPEAKER_01There are gaps. But I would say that I do remember um a lot of what happened. Now, determining what was reality and what was delusional or like you know, delusion was very difficult for me as I tried to piece it back together, but I do have like, you know, memories of the time.
SPEAKER_00When you think back to that experience, are you in it yourself or do you almost watch a different version of you living that life?
SPEAKER_01Depends on the day and how I'm and how I'm coping. Um, I think that riding through it, I definitely had moments where I had to just kind of pretend almost like I mean to dissociate and pretend like it was happening to someone else just because it is traumatic and it is difficult. And when I really sit down and think about a lot of the things that I shared, it makes me really sad. So I think that I did in some ways like have to remove myself from the situation. Um, I don't know that it was always a healthy approach, but it was kind of what I I did what I needed to do.
SPEAKER_00Sure. And then so was there anything that worked for you that could help you kind of click in and out because you're a mom of two, you're an online presence, you're a writer. There were you had to live your life simultaneously. You know, you're probably having to like, I don't know, pick up lots of toys and and clean up spills while also going to this trickier space to live in to write your book. How did you live those two lives simultaneously?
SPEAKER_01It's a very good question. My book deal was finalized six days after my son was born. So I wow, you were really in it. I was in it. I don't know. I mean, I think that I just had the deadline in my mind and I kind of treated it like any other project. I kind of set goals and said, okay, I've got to, I've got to meet this deadline. Like I have to have the book done by April. There's no world where I I mean, you can obviously ask for extensions and all of that, but given my personality, that's just not what I was going to do. Yeah. So I think that I um, you know, there are some days that I wrote literally one-handed, holding my baby in one hand and just like flick-clacking with the other. I think having a supportive partner definitely helped. My husband did a lot of the um child care on weekends and nights so that I could, you know, go to my favorite coffee shop and just knock out a few paragraphs. I love that. So so yeah, I think I did it mainly because I had to. I'm not quite sure. I'm quite sure the mechanics, but I I just I had no choice. I was like, I've got to get this done.
Deadlines Plus Title And Cover
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it is honestly incredible what we are capable of when we really just have no other choice and you just don't have time to like think about it. Okay, so talk to me about finding the title.
SPEAKER_01So that's an interesting, um, always an interesting question because that was from my publisher. Okay. I had the process that every author goes through where you present your titles, you know, in the proposals. Um, and they liked one and like were kind of like on board with it. But then after they took it to their whole like marketing and sales team, they were like, What about missing me? And I was kind of like, Okay, you know, I um I felt like it really did fit the book better than anything that I could have come up with. Okay. So I was I was really happy with it.
SPEAKER_00Did you have a working title while you were writing, something that inspired you or unlocked the creativity, or was it just like my memoir?
SPEAKER_01Here we go. I think that so we had it, we had the title. Uh, the original title that I submitted in my proposal was While We're Here. Um and I did I did connect with that and I did with the help of my agent come up with that. But I think that once I heard Missing Me, I was like, okay, yeah, this fits. This is this is it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but I could see how while we're here would be creatively inspiring. Like that's a good title too, for sure. Um, okay, and then did you have any hand in designing the cover? I love the cover. It's also the same colors. My podcast colors are pink, blue, and yellow.
SPEAKER_01So I like that. I gave direction in the like sense of sharing covers that I'd seen online and liked, um, things that I didn't want. My only thing that I didn't want was I didn't want to picture me on the cover. Okay. So you guys can do whatever else makes sense or whatever else you know you want to do, but I do not want to picture me on the cover. So I gave them like very minimal direction and they came, their art team came back with that, which I thought was fabulous. Why didn't you want your picture on the cover? I just, you know, I feel like I have books where the author's on the cover and I love that for them, but it just couldn't be me. It wasn't right for you. Yeah.
Perfectionism Anxiety And Self Worth
SPEAKER_00Okay, well, let's get into your memoir. Reading your memoir, it feels like you put a lot of pressure on yourself throughout your life to look a certain way, pressures to be thin, what you write about, to be a certain way in your good wife area and daughter, right? Your father was a pastor as well. Yes. Yes. So, right, good wife, good daughter, good Christian. Act a certain way, your social interactions, where you talk about not wanting to get too tipsy and feel out of control, pressures that I have felt many times in various degrees throughout my life. Where do you think that those pressures came from?
SPEAKER_01I think that I have just always been very self-critical, for better or for worse.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Even now I struggle with compliments. If someone tells me that they like the book, I think, oh God, they feel bad for me because this terrible thing happened. That's why they're saying that. And then if someone told me they hated the book, I'd be like, all right, I believe that. Um why do we do that? Why do we do that? So funny. I mean, I feel like I've gotten better over the years, but yeah, I have been always been very perfectionist, very like wanting to be perceived in the way that I want to be perceived. I think that part of that is because I did struggle a lot with anxiety growing up. And I think that because that was out of my control, I was like, okay, how I present myself and how I am, you know, perceived in the world is in my control, which it it isn't, but it felt like it felt like at the time that I was like, okay, this is one thing that I do have that I can kind of own. Yeah. Yeah. That was a pattern or, you know, a behavior that started very young.
SPEAKER_00This is from one of your journal entries. You write, I've wasted 27 years desperately trying to shrink into spaces that weren't meant for me. You said it, it seems like it continues to be a battle a little bit, like it always will be. But what was that moment like for you when you realized that maybe this was something that you needed to pivot from, didn't want to do anymore, recognized that you were doing, and could kind of break free from.
SPEAKER_01Funnily enough, I think that the psychotic episode helped in a very weird way with some of that. I felt uninhibited, truly, like without a care in the world for the first time in my life. Um, I didn't care what people thought of me. I didn't care how I looked or how I sounded or any of these things that had plagued me my entire life. So I felt free, you know. I said whatever I wanted. I talked about them a book. I cursed up a storm, which I would have never, you know, would never in public say the F word. Like I would, you know, things like that, that I just had all these rules for myself that I built up over the years that like were gone. So when I recovered from the psychosis, as as I was recovering, I think that I then had to reckon with what like who I was, you know what I mean? Like, what did I want? What did I learn about myself through this terrible experience that I wanted to carry with me, that I wanted to keep? Like what lessons were actually, you know, not that I mean, not as, you know, wild as as they may have seemed. So I I think that that was a part of that. I think that I craved that feeling, the carefree nice of it all. Easier said than done to actually live that way. But it was a really interesting experience.
SPEAKER_00Are there ways now that you try to model for your children, letting go of the perfectionism?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that it's hard because my daughter is five, and I feel like I one of my friends once joked like you can be a bad parent until they're four and they start to understand the world. It's just not true. Well not true, true. But to some extent, yeah. When you think about like the things that you say and do, like when they're little, like my my son is like a year and a half, like I don't have to worry about the words that I'm using to describe a situation around him to the extent that I do with my five-year-old. Yes. So I mean, I think that I have had to let go of a little bit of that just for the sake of practicing what I preach. So, you know, like I stopped looking at reviews. That's one thing that I did do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because I was like so in my head about it and so honestly insufferable about all of these thoughts that I had about what people were saying. And and, you know, I kind of had a moment where I was like, okay, I can't unwrite the book. This review does nothing for me because I can't, there's no lesson that I can really learn from this. Yeah. You know, if they didn't like this chapter, didn't like how I phrased that, like, what am I gonna do with that? Yeah. So I think that not looking at reviews is one big thing that helped me kind of as I talk to my daughter about like showing herself grace and you know, she's in kindergarten, so she's dealing with like, you know, this person doesn't want to be my friend and all of these things. I think that I kind of had to let go of like needing to know everything that ever that people were saying about me to kind of like be honest with her about like, yeah, like sometimes people might not want to be your friend, and that's okay, rather than again, me spiraling at a three-star review.
Faith Therapy And Medication
SPEAKER_00It's crazy how kids can hold up a mirror. I have a seven-year-old, she's in first grade, and she's also forced me to confront the things within myself that I don't I I want to try my best, you know, to keep her from experiencing, you know. And and we'll get into more silver linings. And one of them I know for you was your battle with equaling thinness to goodness. And like one thing that I told my husband years ago was I don't want to weigh myself. I don't want to talk about my weight in front of my child. I don't want her to weigh her. I don't want her to associate any type of value with the number on the scale, any good or bad, because it goes from good to bad real fast. You know what I mean? So we'll get to more of those silver linings for you, but let's talk about some of these pressures a little bit. Religion. You talked about growing up a in a Pentecostal household. You talk about God's love and being lovable, and you talk about being in this church. So I grew up Catholic. So it was very, it was very interesting reading your experience. Obviously, in the Catholic text and in the tradition, there are times when God comes to people and says things, right? I mean, in the Bible, it says that. But you were really conditioned to believe that if you were good enough or righteous enough or worthy enough that God would talk to you, God would heal you without, you know, you needing any sort of like outside help. Talk to me about feeling that and and living in that weird place of like, this is what I think God's love looks like, but I'm not necessarily experiencing it, right? Like God wasn't talking to you. You didn't feel like you were getting healed out of your dark thoughts. So, how how did you live through that time in your life?
SPEAKER_01I think that it was all that I knew. So I think that that that helped, honestly. Um, something that I appreciate appreciate about Pentecostalism, even though I am like way far away from that now, was that God was always very close and very tangible and cared about our day-to-day and was just very present. Um, it was it was a really comforting thought. I think that when it came to me, especially not getting healed from my mental health conditions, I dealt with a lot of guilt, honestly. I felt like there was something that I was doing wrong that was causing this thing to not happen for me. So that was that was a struggle for sure. And like as you mentioned, and I talked about in the book, like God not talking to me and not feeling spiritual enough or holy enough and all of these things. I feel like it was just like a constant battle. And it honestly didn't end for me until I was in like my twenties, I would say, that I fully let go of this idea of what God was or what I'd always thought God was.
SPEAKER_00And what maybe his love looked like or felt like. Yeah. Yeah. You write about your parents and they seem to have such a beautiful the open door policy. It seems like they made you feel loved and valued as best that they could, given the information that they had. And you do see a therapist, but she's a a religious therapist. And so you talk about this moment. I mean, I got goosebumps when you were like, if I had gone to a secular therapist when I was younger, like what would have changed? What would have been different? How has it been kind of re-examining these questions for you, knowing that you'll never really have that answer and you have to sort of move forward?
SPEAKER_01When I look back at that time in my life, my counselor, my therapist served an important purpose in the time that she was in my life. I think that I try not to get caught up in the butt I needed medication, and she never suggested that. And that could have saved me a hospitalization. I try to not end up in that thought spiral. I mean, it's just like anything, you know, you get caught up in the what ifs of what if I done this? What if I done that? You know, what if life had treated me differently in this way? So I mean, I think that I kind of just had to accept it like, okay, this sucked, but you know, maybe my hospitalization brought me to the psychiatrist that I needed, which I believe. That it did, you know, or gave me the resources that I wouldn't have had any other way. So I mean, maybe I in the end, like was always supposed to experience that hospitalization. Like when you look at the universe and fate and all of that, like maybe that was how the story was going to play out, regardless. Yeah. But I don't see a religious counselor now. I wouldn't send my child to a religious counselor. So I think that my my thought process about it all has definitely changed even as I've like made peace with more of it.
SPEAKER_00What I appreciated about you bringing this up, because I agree, I don't think you can play the what if game. We're we're where we are now, and if we're doing okay, then like, you know, life had to happen the certain way for us to get here. But I think that it can be helpful for people who maybe have a child who's going through something that you write about going through, or even a young person who just might need that extra push to realize, like, oh, I can't pray this away, or oh, it doesn't mean I'm a bad person if I need medication. Because I think there's still a lot of stigma with that. And it's a dangerous stigma.
SPEAKER_01Yes. I mean, yeah, it is still, I mean, I feel like it's gotten better. I feel like there are more conversations happening than there were 20 years ago when I was.
SPEAKER_00And your memoir adds to that conversation in a beautiful way. It really does.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Yeah. There's still work to be done, but I I am encouraged by the shifts that I've seen, just even like the people that I know. You know, I feel like people are so much more open to therapy and medication than they once were, which is a really beautiful thing.
Parenting And Black Maternal Health
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I think it takes women like you being open about their stories and just inviting other people to witness your experience, even if they haven't gone through something themselves. It just makes all of our compassion and empathy grow, which is all we can hope for these days, I think. So you talked about how you would not send your children to a spiritual counselor now. You write this it's every parent's worst fear. You will do anything to keep your child safe, but how do you protect them from themselves? You were experiencing self-harm. Your parents were trying their best to help you in the ways that they could, like I said, having gone through your own experience, do you have a plan? Do you have ideas of how you could navigate if something similar happened to one of your children? Because I think that as like as a parent myself, it's one of like my biggest fears is like not being able to help them or even like your parent, it's just reading the compassion that they had towards you, the open door policy, and it's still, you still didn't feel a hundred percent comfortable sharing. So how do we do it, Ayana?
SPEAKER_01How do we do it? Here are all the answers. Yes, please. I need them from you. I wish. Um, you know, I think that one thing that I do plan to do as my daughter gets older is talk about my story with her in an age-appropriate way. You know, I'm not gonna give her all the gory details about being hospitalized, but to talk about therapy and to talk about mental health and to talk about all of these things in a way that is, you know, neutral but positive. Not trying to sway her one way or another or put a diagnosis on her, but to let her know that these resources exist. Yeah. Um, so I think that that is something that I hope to do. And then I mean, honestly, one of the big things that um I feel like, at least with my parents, who again are incredible and I cannot say enough good things about them, but I feel like they did not realize like the impact of me having a phone and talking to people and like all which I don't even get into the in a lot of this in the book, but like being able to access some of the resources that I accessed as far as self-harm and how to self-harm and eating disorders and how to starve yourself. So I think that um, you know, our parents just didn't know that the internet could be like a bad place, and so I think having lived through that, I plan to be like a little bit overbearing, for lack of a better word, when it comes to like what she is consuming. Yeah. She can only do so much, she can only do so much, but yeah, I don't know. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00I know. I think you're right though. I think there is something to like those our parents didn't even know to have that conversation because they didn't realize what existed. We know what exists, so we know to at least have that conversation for sure. So you write about being a black woman in America. The Kira story that made me so upset on your behalf. That was so annoying. How you how old were you at this? You had gone to a new school. Yeah, I was I was in kindergarten, yeah. And you were the one black girl in your school, and they were like, Can we just call you Kira? Because that was what the last black girl was called. Yeah. What the absolute I know that this is probably naivety on my part, but like kindergartners already kind of like viewing the world from that point of view is so, so disheartening. Yeah. But I really appreciated the information that you gave us about especially the maternal health system for black women and how it's a it's a way more, it's a way more dangerous situation for black women to give birth in our country in a way that just feels very archaic.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Going through that experience, you write about when you realize that if Serena Williams wasn't listened to and she's like an upper echelon celebrity athlete, what hope was there for you if you had a concern during your pregnancy or during your birth? And just to give listeners a little background on the Serena Williams story, shortly after giving birth to her daughter Olympia via emergency C-section in 2017, Serena Williams suffered a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot blocking an artery in her lungs. And this was a condition that she'd experienced before and immediately recognized. When she found a nurse and specifically requested a CT scan, the nurse dismissed her, suggesting that her pain medication was making her talk crazy. Serena later wrote that no one was really listening to what she was saying, and it was only through persistent self-advocacy that doctors eventually ran the tests, confirmed the clots, and finally began proper treatment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it was honestly very scary, especially because with the birth of my daughter, because it was during the height of the pandemic, I wasn't allowed any support people other than my husband. So I'd plan, and I'd cover this in the book, but I'd plan to have a doula. I kind of had this birth plan. It just wasn't, it didn't end up being what I'd always envisioned, like at all. So I did go in thinking, like, if there are complications, will my husband be able to advocate for me? And I think that even looking back at my birth with my daughter, which ended in an emergency C-section, if I'd had a doula there, someone who kind of could ask the tough questions rather than just nodding along when the doctor said things, yeah, I think that that situation would have been a lot less traumatic for me. Yeah. So, but I mean, as I say, like, I mean, as a black woman, if you make it out alive, you know, that is the goal. So I mean, I look at my story and I think, okay, this could have been different, this could have been different. But like, I'm like, I survived. Like that is really what matters.
SPEAKER_00You survived and your children survive. Yeah. There's no way to know if someone will experience postpartum psychosis. But it feels like throughout your book, you're planting these little seeds. While I was a perfectionist, while I felt anxiety, while I had depression that went unchecked for a while or wasn't helped, while I was a black woman going through this difficult experience with anxiety on top of that, because of statistically what I had seen play out in the maternal health world. Do you feel like that's what you were trying to do? Not say, hey guys, if you experience all of these things, you too will have postpartum psychosis. But it was kind of like maybe this was why, maybe this is why. But truly, we never really know what the triggers are.
SPEAKER_01I think there are risk factors, but none of it is like you would know, you know, from the start. Oh, I'm going to have postpartum psychosis. I think that for me, I had a big fear throughout the book, honestly, that like if I didn't tie it all together, people would be like, Why am I reading about her life? When the cover says memorable about postpartum psychosis. So honestly, that was like a challenge for me, but a good one. I think that I wanted to tell a cohesive story. So I tried to find ways to bring it back because after the psychosis, looking back, I wanted to fix it. I wanted to have an exact explanation of what should have gone differently in my life, of how I should have behaved that would have, you know, prevented it from being as bad as it was. And I couldn't find those answers. So I think I kind of try to take the reader along on that journey with me of like trying, grasping at straws almost and coming up coming up with nothing.
Understanding Postpartum Psychosis And Stigma
SPEAKER_00Well, it's a very human thing to do, right? To try to rationalize, try to explain, try to figure out why. But I think we also just have to say, like, you could, in theory, have a quote unquote perfect life and you could still experience postpartum psychosis. It's just one of those things that happened. You're right, it occurs in one to two of 1,000 births, which is not a small number when you think of the amount of births. And when left untreated, 4% of women will harm or kill their infant.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I have had two children. I didn't experience postpartum psychosis, but I experienced insane postpartum OCD for like five days after the birth of my son, to where like I literally thought my my husband and daughter were going to die every time they left the house. I made, I started to track them. It was horrible. And so I'm working on getting financing for a short film about that right now. And so I've talked to a lot of postpartum health mental counselors to kind of make sure that we're capturing that just right. Because it feels like there's still a lot of shame associated with this thing that is very, very much out of our control. It's hormones, it's butt chemistry. And I really appreciated, and this may be a hot take, but like when you brought up Andrea Yates and these women who we now, like, yes, did they do a monstrous thing, but we now know it's because they were suffering from something where if someone had just paid attention or done something a little differently, maybe something could have changed and lives could have been saved. And I think when we go through life pretending that these bad things don't happen to people, that postpartum psychosis doesn't exist, we are setting up a system that will continue to fail babies and women and families. And that's also what I just really appreciated about your memoir. You're just like, this happens, this happens. And thank God I had such a support system, but I could have easily not. And it could have really been terrible.
SPEAKER_01So I never had a voice telling me to kill my if anything, it was interesting. I thought that the people around me were going to kill her. I, if anything, I was not tempted, I don't know what the word is, I was told, I was thinking whatever, to harm the people trying to harm her. So, like all of these people around me, like my husband's family, my family, distant relatives, people I hadn't seen in years, like they're all going to be trying to kill her. But I mean, the delusions shift all the time, and I have no way of knowing how if I'd been home for longer, what voices I would have heard. I'd I have no idea if being closer in proximity to my daughter would have led to me having more delusions centered on her. Yeah. So I think that it is it's a very sobering thought. I was reading a book recently about postform psychosis, and they talk about a woman who thankfully recovered, but she had a delusion that her house was on fire and there were firefighters. She's on the second story of her house. There are firefighters on the in her backyard on the um first floor, asking her to throw her baby down to save the baby from the burning house. Yeah. And so thankfully she got treatment in time and she was taken to the hospital. But it's like if that had happened and she had heard hurt or killed her baby, then of course, in the headlines, she is a monster. What kind of mother could do this? But then when you actually look at the specifics and how this disorder works and what it does to your brain, then it's it starts to make more sense that you're kind of like, okay, this truly just warps your perception of everything.
SPEAKER_00You know, psychosis, it's a break from reality, from yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And your motherly instinct or whatever you want to call it may still be there. It just presents in a very different, sometimes dangerous way.
SPEAKER_00Right, right. The one thing that this postpartum mental health woman said that really just clicked everything for me was when a woman is going through postpartum depression or OCD, because OCD is when you have these intrusive thoughts, right? And you re and the woman recognizes that it's wrong. That is not psychosis. What happens in psychosis is when a woman does not recognize that that thought is not realistic or wrong, just like the experience that you just shared. That mother thought her house was on fire and she was doing the right thing, saving her baby potentially, had she, you know, gone through that. And so I think that there's just so much damage that we do to women who suffer from postpartum psychosis. And I think that your memoir shines such a light on the experience in a way where, like I said, I think it can just continue a lot of conversations and start a lot of conversations that need to happen. Because if people are aware of it and they know what to look for, people then the women can get the help that they deserve. But until we start talking about it, I mean, I don't know about you. When I was pregnant and I I love this part where you talked about how you would live your life in like worst case scenario because you were convinced that if you thought of all the ways that things could go wrong, then you could keep them from going wrong. And I totally, totally relate. I think that stuff all the time still. I actually I need to like chill out on it because I need to like think, oh, life is good, good things will happen. But it's this really interesting thing where when women are pregnant, there's a there's not a lot of talk about what can go wrong as soon as the baby is here. Mental health-wise, yes, but also physically. I had uh three days after my daughter was born, I was back in the emergency room because I was having heart palpitations and I couldn't breathe. It was like a whole thing. It was a I had a physical situation happening. And at one point, the ER doctor came to me and said, Okay, well, we can rule out postpartum cardiomyopathy. And I thought, what the hell is that? Oh, it's when your heart doubles in size after the birth of your child and you can literally die of a heart attack. And it's like, I understand why we're not inundated with all this information because it can be really scary, but it also feels like, well, the flip side of that is not keeping all the information from us.
SPEAKER_01Right. You know? Yeah. And it's hard. I mean, I'm someone who worries and like am always, you know, as you mentioned, on the lookout for the worst thing that could happen. But I think that for me, when I look back at my experience, if I had known or if someone around me had known that postpartum psychosis presents with, you know, mood swings, insomnia, I can't remember all of the all of the symptoms on the top of my head, but irritability, you know, all of these things that were happening, like textbook postpartum psychosis, I think that we would have caught it earlier. Now, would that have changed anything? It's hard to say. Right. I thought the people who experienced postpartum psychosis who were only hospitalized for a couple of days, you know. So I mean, maybe that maybe I I can't say. Would my story have ended differently if it if I hadn't gotten so far and been so far gone before I was hospitalized? Yeah, it's like, yeah, I wish that I'd at least known that. You know, maybe if I just like like you mentioned with the heart condition, like maybe if we just like sprinkle a few symptoms to look out for, yeah.
SPEAKER_00But then we'll help we'll help parents out. I don't know. Especially if it's your first child, you don't know what is something that's concerning and what's something that is like quote unquote normal, right? Like insomnia. It's like, well, of course, I'm up all the time. I mean, and you and you write that in your memoir. You're like, it was your psychiatrist at the time who kind of told your husband, yes, my psychiatrist, this is something that if it escalates, like basically we need to pay attention to this. And thank God, at what point would your husband have have realized that there was something wrong?
SPEAKER_01I think that I would have ended up in the hospital either way that day because I again I was shouting prophecies from God. That's true. I was kidding.
SPEAKER_00And that was very different for you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, not my norm. So he was very like, what is going on? But yeah, I mean, my psychiatrist told us which hospital to go to. Again, speaking of my support system, called the doctor at the hospital psychiatrist on staff at this hospital to say, Hey, my patient is coming in. These are the symptoms. Basically, like keep me posted, take care of her. So I was immensely lucky in a lot of ways.
SPEAKER_00Let's talk a little bit more about postpartum psychosis. You can give a little brief overview because obviously we want everyone to pick up your book and they really, really should. What was your experience like?
SPEAKER_01I was really worried about postpartum depression after giving birth because I'd had a history of depressive episodes. And instead, I felt amazing. I felt like I remember thinking, like, why did anyone tell me that? And I don't know if I said this in the book or not, but like, why did anyone tell me how good I was gonna feel? Like, I could, I was I think I put on my Instagram story a picture of my husband, and I was like, let's have 10 more babies, you know? And so people are just like laughing at this stuff because whatever, but like I was serious. I was like, I feel incredible, like birth has activated something within me. Yeah, but then I would started swinging and I was really down and then I was really up, and then I was irritable, then I was mad, then I was really funny. That was something that you know, I don't think I really cover much in the book, but I was kind of like the life of the party. Like I was a jokester, I was making people laugh all the time, you know. I was full of funny stories, I couldn't get my words out fast enough. Um, you know, I was in the group chats, like lighting up the group chats, like I was I was doing great. So I have all of this going on. Um, and my husband and Doula started to pick up before like things got bad or got even weird, both started to notice like I was not sleeping, like she hasn't been sleeping. So they kind of looking at it back, like hindsight being 2020, they almost knew that something could be happening before anyone else did. But it took a turn toward me feeling distrustful of anyone else being around my daughter. It all happened very quickly. I was hospitalized 10 days after I gave birth, right? The distrust probably started around day six or day seven. Once I started to feel paranoia about my husband and my mother and like all of these relatives, it snowballed like it escalated very quickly. And then within a couple of days, I was hearing from God.
SPEAKER_00And what was God telling you? A whole lot. Um being that you will write a book one day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So, yes, that is something that I cover. It's very like meta and weird to think about. But yeah, the first prophecy that I heard from God was that I was going to write a book after I was out of psychosis. I was like, that was so weird. Like, why did I think that? That's so embarrassing. And then I have a book. So it life came full circle in a very strange way. I heard that I was a special prophet, that I was going to rewrite the Bible. I heard stories about my friends, like things, secrets that my friends had they hadn't told me. I believed that my daughter was a second coming of Jesus, she was supernatural, um, that she was immortal. Like it was just all over the place. It was very out there.
SPEAKER_00And what did God's voice sound like?
SPEAKER_01That's not you know, no one's ever asked me that question. I think it just it felt so familiar. I mean, given that now I know or can say that it was my own kind of delusional thoughts, it makes sense that it felt so close because it was me. Yeah. But I mean, it was just kind of like I felt it in my body. Like I would get these words and they'd appear in my head, and and it just felt so real. It was unlike anything I've ever experienced.
Silver Linings Shame And Control
SPEAKER_00And we talked a little bit about silver linings or maybe surprising good things that came out of this. And so one of them that we talked about earlier was you're feeling a freedom and a peace in being uninhibited for the first time in your life. Yeah. And then you also write this chapter called Pretty Profit. I resonated with so much. You're told that being a woman looks and is a certain way. And when you don't feel like you fit that mold, what does that mean about you, right? And so talk to me a little bit about that silver lining and the other little ones that maybe popped up in retrospect.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, I think that I alternated between wanting nothing to do with the experience. You know, after I got out of the hospital, I was back at work within two or three weeks of my release, threw myself into work, was busier than ever, like barely had time to sleep until I crashed, as one does when you are uprooting like that. So I think I've resented the whole experience. But, you know, my husband actually said a lot of what you were saying was nonsensical and disturbing and upsetting, but some of it was true. I was like, you know, I had that thought too. Like some of the things that I was saying, some of the revelations that I was having about my life and my decisions and other people and like reading the journals, I'm like, there is there are elements of truth to this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I think that I I'm not in everything happens for a reason person, but I did think, okay, if this did happen and it's such a big part of me now, like what, if anything, can I learn from it? So I think the big one was that I'm not in control. I'm still struggling to accept that. But yeah, like yeah, I am not in control, I'm nowhere near in control. None of us are, you know, this could happen. Psychosis can happen really to anyone.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Right. It's not just a postpartum condition. Right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I mean, it can be drug-induced, it can be induced by, you know, insomnia, it can be induced by all these things. But yeah, anyone can experience psychosis. So I I think that learning that I wasn't in control was like a big one. And then also I think that I, as you mentioned, had placed such an emphasis on my appearance and my social know-how that I just kind of had to let go of that. I think that I looked back at the psychosis and I did so many embarrassing things and I, you know, wasn't showering and I was like behaving very strangely, and it was all my worst nightmare, basically. And I'm kind of like, okay, like I kind of had to let go. I let go of that completely in psychosis. And now I have to reckon with the fact that I did let go of that and like the world didn't end, you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I did embarrass myself. I was saying cringeworthy things, but like the earth is still spinning, you know? Yeah. So it's almost like exposure therapy in a way. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Oh wow. Yeah. Was there a letting go of blame or an internalized shame or anything else that you've had to work through since being on the other side of the psychosis?
SPEAKER_01I definitely think that even now I can still find myself in that hole if I dig enough. Yeah. I think that I felt so conflicted because I dealt with anxiety and it was terrible and it was difficult and I dealt with depression. But all of those things felt like things that like happened solely to me and that I had some say over, even though I didn't. You know what I mean? But I I feel like I could hide those things. And I did do that very well. I can mask how I was actually feeling. In psychosis, you don't have that luxury, and you're kind of like everything is revealed to everyone, and you don't have much of a say over how you're behaving. So I think that I struggled with the idea of psychosis because I didn't I cover this, but I'd always thought that I was like this mental health advocate. But I also had like this asterisk of like, okay, as long as I don't have one of the scary conditions, you know what I mean? As long as I've just got depression and anxiety, like we're good, I can talk about mental health. So I had to reckon with both the way that I'd behaved and my attitude toward it. And realizing that I'd kind of had like a little bit of a problematic outlook on mental health conditions that were more stigmatized. And I hadn't realized that until I actually developed one.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. But would you say that you you don't feel any blame or shame for having gone through this experience?
SPEAKER_01I would say now I think that's fair to say. I think that I still do have some embarrassment that I think will always be there just because I embarrassed myself, you know. So it's normal to feel embarrassed when you've acted embarrassingly. But I think that I've made a lot of peace with like everything else. And I am like in a generally a good place with it now.
Second Pregnancy And Finding Joy
SPEAKER_00Good. You and your husband make the decision to have another baby. Yes. And you write about how you knew that it was a possibility that you would go experience psychosis again. So, in what ways were you able to navigate that decision together?
SPEAKER_01I think the biggest hurdle, honestly, was me emotionally. I was so, so scared about what was going to happen. And after I found out I was pregnant with my son, I had the thought of like, why am I doing like I could be completely just like wreaking havoc on my life right now by doing this, you know? Yeah. At that point, my daughter was three years old. We were in a rhythm. She was potty trained. So that was something I was like, oh, gotta go through that again. But um, I so I had all these fears about like this could go wrong, and it'd be even worse for me because one, my daughter's old enough that she would know that I was gone if I went to the hospital. And two, I would feel even more emotion toward the whole thing if I um if I'd lived through this and I had to live through it again. You know, I think I would have felt like what's going on? Like lightning is struck twice. So I mean, we took practical steps, like hiring a night doula. My psychiatrist was like very mindful of my medication and the medications that she thought would be best for me immediately postpartum in the hospital after I'm giving birth. She was like adjusting my medication, immediately putting me on higher doses of certain things and all of that. So I had, you know, the medical help, but I think that the biggest thing was just having to again relinquish control.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Had to accept, you know, this could happen again. There's a decent recurrence rate for post-artosis sufferers for it to happen in subsequent pregnancies. So I just had to kind of accept that we're gonna do this and we're just gonna see how it goes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Were you still able to breastfeed your children, or was that something that you were trying to navigate with medication? You know, it's a tricky thing that, but I think women battle it because they feel like, well, I should be breastfeeding my kid. Well, it's like not if you need to take medication so that you feel okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. With my daughter, so the birth that ended in the psychosis, I breastfed for a matter of days before my psychiatrist, once she was involved, said, you know, I think that is that was something else that I don't know that I mentioned in the book that she was trying to prescribe medication for me from a far so it's you know, peak COVID, so she can't meet with me. So she's sending medication to my pharmacy saying, Okay, take the big thing was getting me to sleep. Like, please, can she have like a good night's sleep? And I just I wasn't, it wasn't working. So she was trying all these medications, and she basically was like, I think that it would be best if you did not breastfeed because there is a lot going on right now. And I struggled with that, I think for years, honestly, that I felt jealous when people would post about their breastfeeding journeys and just kind of had a feeling, honestly, of like, why is pregnancy and childbirth and postpartum so easy for some people and not me? Like every part of it has been grueling. But um, with my son, I didn't even try to breastfeed. I dried up my milk the second it came in, and that was a really freeing decision for me. I would have been able to breastfeed on the medication, but it just would have been like I just was like, I just I love formula like I did with my daughter, it's fine. You've made the best decision for you. Yeah, let's just go for it. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00No, I think that that's fantastic. Okay, so let's talk about where you are now. You write, there's room in the aftermath for joy. So, how are you finding joy in the aftermath?
SPEAKER_01I think that I have such an appreciation now for the mundane, for the day-to-day, for my mind, honestly. I feel very grateful that I kind of have my wits about me and am able to live the life that I want to live. And I I'm happy, I'm genuinely happy. And I think that a part of that comes from me lowering my standards a little bit because I'm like, things could be so much worse. Like, so much worse.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, you know, not experiencing, so I should have included this when we were talking earlier about my second birth. I did not experience psychosis with him. So that was like a very redemptive experience as well. And I think that I was like, okay, this still isn't the postpartum that some people get because I'm still looking over my shoulder for, you know, insomnia or delusion or a mood swing. Yeah. But it is good. Like this is good. And I'm getting to spend time with my family and my baby and to just soak it up. And so that was something that was an experience for me that was really, really powerful, honestly. And that I that kind of hold hold close.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Before I let you go, I have two questions for you. I have one that I ask all authors, and then I have this question jar thing that I've started. Okay. The one question that I ask is, How do you stay hopeful today?
SPEAKER_01I think that I stay hopeful by, and this is so cliche, but it really is looking at the little things. Like sometimes I just have to throw my phone across the room, like literally, I just have to like chuck it across the room and turn off the TV and just like sit and think my phone background is actually a piece of art that says in another universe, I'm dreaming of this life right here. And that's kind of like what I have thought, you know, I have maybe not the life I'd always envisioned, but I have this like really special, beautiful life and this really amazing family and amazing friends, and like things are good. So, like, I'm not always hopeful about the state of the world, obviously. But in general, I feel like being in like community, getting together with my friends or going on a date with my husband, like these silly little things help me remember like the good that there is good.
SPEAKER_00I think that's beautiful, and I agree. When when the world feels like everything's crumbling down, I do. I look to my left, I look to my right, and I think, okay, it's still there's still beauty, you know? There's still there's laughter and little smudges all over my windows, and I wouldn't change a thing about it. Okay, let's see what the question jar has for you today. I'm excited. Ooh, what does enough look like for you these days?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I think that it's an interesting question because I was actually just talking to an author friend. Anyone who's been through the process can probably relate. There's always something else, you know. So you get the agent and then you need the publisher. Okay, so you get the book deal and that's great. But then uh someone else got a better book deal, and it's like, oh god, like am I worthless compared to this person, you know, and your book comes out and there are reviews, but other people have more reviews and better reviews, and other people's books are selling better and getting more acclaim than you. So I feel like in this process specifically, I feel like I'm always looking for the next thing, and it's been exhausting. It really goes back to that quote that I mentioned that is on my phone lock screen, you know, in another universe. I'm dreaming of this life right here, reminding myself that, like, okay, I wrote a book and that's really cool. Like, it doesn't matter what lists it makes or how many stars on goodreads it gets. This is something that I did, you know. So can I just like rest with that and and sit on that thought and be grateful for that and not constantly be looking for the next accolade or the next comparison point? My answer is book related because right now my mind is consumed by only the buckle. That's the only thing that makes sense playing in my mind right now. Yes, yes. But yeah, hopefully that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00I think it's important for us to realize that we're doing incredible things and we can't always understand the effect that it's going to have on people. And I honestly think if your memoir makes one woman feel less alone or makes one family realize that maybe something could happen or is happening and saves one life, like, is that enough?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a great, that's a great point, a great way to look at it.
SPEAKER_00It's hard, especially when you when you pour your heart in into something and it's such a meaningful thing. So I'm rooting for you, babe.
SPEAKER_01You are a great interviewer, by the way. I've been on a lot of podcasts, but I love this conversation. This has been really special.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. That that means a lot. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We will link how to buy your amazing memoir, Missing Me, in our show notes. And of course, I'll spit it out in all stories. And um, you guys pick up this memoir because even if you are not a woman, haven't experienced pregnancy, or any sort of postpartum mental health disorder, I promise you will find something of value here, something to reflect on, something to feel seen and heard and understood. Thank you, Ana, so much for coming on the show. Bye love. And thank you all so much for listening. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please do me a favor and rate the show wherever you listened and share this one with a friend. Maybe that perfectionist friend who needs a reminder that her worth is so much more than how she's perceived. Next week, I'm dropping a bite-sized episode on Kids Wait Till You Hear This, the autobiography from EGOTIcon Liza Minelli. At nearly 80, she's finally ready to tell her story on her own terms. Growing up as the daughter of Judy Garland and Vincent Minelli, the marriages, the addiction, the financial ruin, the comebacks, and what it really means to spend a lifetime choosing joy over sympathy. You do not want to miss this one. Until then, take care.
