When I was a teenager, I would go through periods of uncontrollable sobbing followed by feelings of despondency. My parent told me it was normal teenage hormones. I was probably going to start my period soon.

I thought about the futility of life a lot, especially for a young woman with her entire life ahead of her. My moods consisted of wild vagaries I felt like I had little control over. At times, I was laser-focused on school and extracurriculars and ambitions I had, but those times were always followed by periods of total disinterest. Some semesters I was a 4.0 student working two jobs. Others, I failed classes because I couldn’t pull myself out of bed, lost jobs, and at one point dropped out of college altogether. (I went back!)

I didn’t know these things were symptoms of depression. In my naïve mind, depression was wanting to die. Sometimes there was that, but much of the time (gratefully) there wasn’t. My assumption was that there was something wrong with me. These weren’t symptoms, but character flaws on my part. It was jarring to realize years later that depression is actually considered a disability. To this day, it’s difficult to untether myself from the incessant self-loathing that comes with depression (What’s wrong with me? Why am I like this?) and accept that the symptoms I experience—the sometimes debilitating mood swings, the fatigue, indifference, intrusive thoughts—are part and parcel of a medical condition.

Then when I became a mother almost two years ago, I experienced postpartum depression. Again, I didn’t recognize the symptoms right away. I did, but I didn’t. There was the crying in the shower after I couldn’t get the baby to stop screaming or couldn’t get my breasts to produce milk or couldn’t get my weight to go down or couldn’t bear the thought of spending another day at work smiling and pretending that I was okay.

That was easy to recognize, but then again, every new mom gets the blues. That shit is hard. Entering motherhood is like entering pure survival mode. We spend pregnancy daydreaming about all these wonderful truths and experiences we’ll share with our babies, but when the baby comes, that fantasy is shot to a horrible, loud, exhausted death.

The things I didn’t recognize were the bouts of rage. I lost my temper over the smallest things. Relatives not sticking to her feeding schedule, not burping her right. Being invited places infuriated me, because didn’t people know that we had to get ourselves and a baby ready now? How dare they. I made a habit of cursing a whole lot more than I ever did before. There were intrusive thoughts I still can’t bring myself to admit outside of a therapist’s office.

The disconnection between mother and child turned out to be nothing like what I expected the “disconnection” to feel like. I loved her. There were times I felt frustrated (that is probably the understatement of my lifetime), but I loved her. When I heard about the disconnection mothers feel during postpartum depression, I thought that meant the mother didn’t feel love for her child. For some women, that might be true. It wasn’t for me.

Instead, at times, I felt like she didn’t love me, like I wasn’t a good enough mother and she knew it. I worried over the fact that she took a long time to develop the ability to smile while she was awake. I thought it meant she wasn’t happy. How could I know for sure? That insecurity felt shameful, like admitting that I worried my baby wasn’t happy was the same thing as admitting that I was a terrible mother. Good mothers make their babies happy.

It took me a long time, but eventually I sought medical help. Admitting I needed help was painful. It was like looking at myself in the mirror and admitting there was something wrong with me. At least, that’s what I felt. I had friends with mental health struggles, though. Never did I think there was something wrong with them. For some reason, I resisted showing myself the same empathy.

Then came admitting I was getting help, which I didn’t. To anyone. Not even my husband. Most of my friends didn’t have children. The one who did was an incredible mom who made it seem so easy I was convinced she could raise a child in her sleep. My family? I didn’t want to make them worry.

Truly, I didn’t want anyone to see past my veneer. I was supposed to be a supermom. I was supposed to bear my child and get back to business, no falter in my step. In some ways, I did. I worked in fundraising at the time and raised nearly $500,000 for cancer patients, but I suffered the entire way.

I wrote the novel I’m currently querying during my experience with postpartum depression. The ideas for my novel were very much inspired by these experiences. However, my experiences are only mine. They aren’t universal truths. I don’t have the prescription for overcoming postpartum depression. I don’t have advice except seek medical help. I wouldn’t want to pretend otherwise.

My perspective on art, is that the artist should convey what they know to be true. While writing this novel, I asked myself that a lot. What do I know to be true about mental illness?

Not much, except that there is a divergence between the information that is available to patients about mental illness and the beliefs we hold for ourselves. Thanks to much important activism, most of us have learned to show empathy to those dealing with mental illness. Yet when we struggle with it, this knowledge can be difficult to apply to ourselves. Sometimes, it feels impossible.

Women are forty percent more likely to suffer from depression. That percentage jumps even higher for women of color. Here, I think opportunities exist for important conversations about trauma and the role gender and race play in being exposed to trauma. Here, I think we should talk about the pressure women put on themselves to do it all, to be perfect mothers and employees and whatever other roles we take on, and the ways in which that conflicts with admitting we need help, and then accessing it. Then, of course, there’s a huge, unavoidable discussion about accessibility of mental healthcare.

Not much, except that postpartum depression is still an awful, isolating, sometimes shame-filled experience that anywhere from ten to twenty percent of new mothers experience (probably higher considering the number of women who don’t seek help). Despite all of the awareness that’s raised for mental illnesses, so much of postpartum depression and women’s mental health remains mystified.

I won’t pretend like my novel answers any of these questions, or solves any of these problems. It’s merely a story that I hope other people (and particularly mothers) who have experienced mental illness can read someday and say, “Hey, me too.”