Hello, I’m a New Mother and Recovering Overachiever.

A little over a year and a half ago, when my daughter was six months old, I was diagnosed with postpartum depression. I hadn’t been “feeling myself” since our daughter had turned six weeks old… and when I really thought about it, I hadn’t exactly been feeling like myself during pregnancy either. Regardless, it seemed important to get some official help, so I added an anti-anxiety medication into the mix and began going to therapy.

I’m not sure if I can say I’m “back to normal” because, frankly, I don’t think there is a “back” once you have a baby. But I’m feeling better, and as I reflect on the last two plus years, I’m not sure whether what I had was postpartum depression or just my natural tendencies toward overachieving, and the accompanying anxiety, amplified in the light of the biggest challenge I’ve yet to face: motherhood. I set such high expectations for myself, as so many new mothers do, and an overachiever to the core, I took on each milestone like it was an assignment at work I needed to hit out of the park. Breastfeeding? Let’s produce the most milk ever. Sleep training? Let’s read so. many. books. and then impose a rigid nap-in-the-crib regiment that imprisoned both me and my daughter in our wee apartment way too much. Tummy time? Fuck yes. Mommy and baby yoga? We tried that… and then never went back again after my daughter accidentally scratched her own cornea and screamed uncontrollably for the last 15 minutes of class while I apologized constantly and bounced/shushed my daughter, probably too zealously, in the corridor as the murmur of mothers chanting om to their babies was drowned out by my own baby’s wailing.

Looking back on my life, I’ve tended to avoid activities, hobbies or pursuits I wasn’t naturally good at… instead gravitating toward the things that came naturally. Certain sports, certain hobbies… if I didn’t feel like I could master them, then I would slowly, and sometimes not so slowly, let them slip to the wayside, never to be returned to again. So when I became a mother, I subconsciously treated this major life transition like any other new endeavor I had approached before… and, just as before, when I wasn’t what I deemed as “naturally good at it,” I faltered.

So the question that keeps coming up in my mind lately is this: did I actually have postpartum depression? Or, rather, was it the ultimate wake-up call, the perfectionist overachiever competitor being smacked in the face with just how little control we have and a reminder that being “the best” is not the ultimate metric for success? There is so much more discourse now about postpartum depression, which is great. It’s slowly slowly slowly becoming less taboo to talk about. Yet postpartum depression is often still portrayed as a one-dimensional experience — one flavor of sadness or anxiety that casts women into a paralyzing shadow. But it’s so much more nuanced, and often more high functioning, than that. And that nuance is what I think needs to be talked about more.

I’m not an expert on postpartum depression, but from my understanding, a lot of it has to do with imbalances: hormonal, chemical, nutritional. Postpartum depression happens to you, whereas overachieving is self inflicted. You do it to yourself. And it’s really hard to tell the difference… Who’s pulling these strings? My ego? Or my out-of-whack hormones? I’m not sure if I’ll ever know the answer… This whole time, I’ve been grappling with feeling like what happened is my fault. A failure of some sort or a deficiency. Whether it’s my overachieving tendencies going into overdrive or an actual chemical imbalance, the answer should be “it doesn’t matter.” Because it isn’t about being at fault or not. I still can’t quite accept that, but I’m working on it.

This isn’t the most original tale, nor is mine any more remarkable or compelling than anybody else’s, but that doesn’t make it any less important to talk about. Because I know so many other overachievers-turned-perfectly-imperfect-mothers who struggle with this same quandary. My hope is that this story will reach other mothers out there who are feeling similarly but having difficulty finding the right words to articulate their experiences.