This video was 21 months in the making.

While I was pregnant with my son, I spent a lot of time on YouTube and Google. There was so much, and I mean so much information out there—a week by week guide to your pregnancy, what to pack in your hospital bag, what to put in your baby registry, how to make a birth plan, how to avoid diastasis recti, the best baby strollers, baby gear recommendations, natural ways to induce labor, actual footage of people giving birth.

It’s an entire universe of information about the how-to’s and logistics of mothering and caring for a baby.

And in a small part of that universe, I heard some people talk about postpartum depression or baby blues, and how it’s very normal, so I knew to expect it.

And yet—I still felt utterly blindsided by it.

What I didn’t realize was that “baby blues” aren’t just a few weeks of feeling down or hormonal. That this very complex emotional journey can start manifesting during pregnancy, and last a long time after birth.

And that it feels a lot like loss.
And grief.

I have long been wanting to make something to capture my thoughts about that experience. What to really expect when you’re expecting. And because I don’t have a lot of videos of me when I was pregnant, instead, I used images from a self-portrait project I did during that time in my life: Every week starting Week 20, I started taking self-portraits using a film camera.

The hope was that maybe, later on, with the help of time and hindsight, I would be able to find the words to articulate just what it was that I was feeling and grieving alongside the joy of growing a human inside me.

It took me all of 21 months, but I finally made it.

In order to make space for everything I gained in motherhood—so much of my old self needed to fall away.

My independence.
My deep connection to my old goals.
A career I love and worked so hard to build.

And that was hard to do. It’s still hard. Those are very important parts of myself. But I often feel so much shame about how much I'm struggling. I was afraid that people would see it as failing. Failing to be resilient. Failing to handle motherhood well.

And so I always tried to sugarcoat it for others.

Always tried to end my captions on a positive note,
an exclamation point,
a wise takeaway,
a heart emoji.

Because let’s face it, for the most part, societal norms expect new mothers to be blissfuly grateful. You can show exhaustion, yes, but you need to keep your grief invisible.

You’re supposed to box it up, move on, tuck it away in the closet with all the pre-pregnancy clothes that don’t fit you anymore, and just accept and be grateful for this new baby.

Writing this and making this film is my way of saying, I want to hold space for grieving my old self. I will never go back to who I was. But I’m not hurrying to move on either. I want to devote time to my coming undone, and to learn to advocate for myself and my needs along the way.

And the more I share about my experience with others, the more I realize I am not alone. That this invisible grief is actually more collective than it is individual. I want to hear more honest stories on how women become mothers. We need to hear more of them.

Because something as universal as motherhood shouldn’t have to be this lonely.

“I believe increasingly that only the willingness to share private and sometimes painful experience can enable women to create a collective description of the world which will be truly ours.”
- Adrienne Rich, poet