Pregnancy was hard on me for gender and pregnancy reasons. Then Locke came 2 months early, and then Reed suffered from something like Postpartum Depression for 18 months. Life was really hard for a long time. But I did the hard therapy work and thought I was past all of it. Locke was consistently sleeping through the night and so was I. But I wasn’t coming out of the brain fog. I worried it was because of substance love affairs I’ve had in the past. Every doctor I talked to told me that wouldn’t have lasting, increasing effects. Was it because I had long covid? The timeline of symptoms starting didn’t match up. But work and home were both being impacted to significant degrees (once the subject was finally broached), and things seemed to be getting worse.

It took a long time for any of this to even come up. I’ve been performing at a high enough level in nearly all parts of my life that most people don’t monitor what I’m doing, and if I do mess up they usually think I have deep thinking behind it at most, and that it’s a small glitch if it is a mistake. But my new manager at work was paying enough attention to notice, and when I brought it up with Reed he was eventually (after being super supportive) like “just so you have all the data.. it’s not just at work.” He had been concerned about early onset dementia, I was being so forgetful and unobservant!

During all that time, I was mostly masking by having good practices in place that were documented and that I could follow even in my reduced state. I have excellent people in my life who were willing and able to support me even through a hard time because I had invested in our relationships when I did have capacity. And so while it took awhile for all this to come to light, and months to diagnose what was happening, I was able to maintain good practices in the meantime. I’ve been riding Past Willow’s coat tails to recover enough for Future Willow to be well again. Thanks, Past Willow!