Mr. Speaker, I woke up mid-day to my husband standing over me. He took a deep breath and bravely said, "I can't do this anymore." After an awful pregnancy, we welcomed our third child. For his first eight months, he cried and never slept. Yes, eventually, our baby stopped crying and started to sleep, but I did not. Daytime became the hunting ground of my self-care, and nights became the slaughterhouse of my self-compassion. Mr. Speaker, I love my children, and I'm a good mom. Having a third child felt like being capsized at sea, gasping for air, and then, being passed a screaming and told, "Hold this." I felt shame. I felt unworthy, and I felt defeated. I had evolved into a dark, empty shell of a human being. I was numb. I was debilitated by self-judgment and frozen by stigma. I denied myself a label that came with a solution because somehow it meant I wasn't a good mother, an honest business owner, or a valued community member.
I built a business around my happy family, selling people visual promises of their happy families. I mislabelled my emotional imagery at the happy imagery, and in my mind, admitting I wasn't happy violated the integrity of what I had built. That day as I lay in bed, my husband told me he couldn't watch me fade away. I had no fight left, but luckily, he did. That was the start of my self-care and compassion journey. I accepted a label of post-partum depression and a journey that included rewriting my definition of self-care from something as small as showering every day to as big as simplifying my support system.
If you have not yet battled your own brain, you know someone who has. According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of sickness and disability globally, yet there is still a cloak of silence that wraps itself around mental health because we feel warmer that way. Stigma becomes the monster of mental health that bullies us into silence, and silence is killing us. Today, as we battle COVID, we need to make sure people have the resources to stop battling themselves. We need to take off the disingenuous warmth that silence only temporarily offers. We need to get uncomfortable before we can get comfortable. Until this moment, I could count on one hand, the number of people who have heard my story. There is an underlying stigma of weakness associated with mental health, but having and sharing emotion is not weakness. I am not weak, and neither are those of you that are listening. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
