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Hello, dear listener and welcome to owning it the anxiety podcast with me, Caroline Forin.substack.com. Thank you. Hello, dear listener, and welcome to owning it the anxiety podcast with me, Caroline

Forin. This week is a solo episode for me. I've had to rejig a few guests around and I had

some scheduling challenges, but I didn't want to let another week go by without an episode,

so I thought that I would jump on and take the mic for myself. So I wrote a piece

for Substack very recently that seemed to really strike a chord and I'm so grateful to any one of you

who have subscribed there as it is such a lovely extension of the work that I do here on the podcast.

So I wrote about my experience of what I think is depression and it is quite a new feeling for me.

I think if I'm being really honest with myself, I became quite low after my son turned two.

I did have a lot of issues in the very early postpartum period but then they settled down.

But it was really when he turned two as things became more challenging than I was

really able to handle for with my son and because I blamed myself for a lot of it.

That plus worsening and really chronic back pain where you just feel physically awful the

whole time I've been in and out of hospital getting procedures done and you just struggle to

see beyond the pain,

all of that was just such a slow cooker recipe for winding up feeling very down and not down in a way that you can just shake yourself out of or just change your mindset to fix

despite how fortunate you know you are or how many chats you have with good people.

Sometimes we just unravel a bit even amidst ostensibly good circumstances.

So much of my parenting experience, as you know, if you've been listening to the series,

has been defined by anxiety, not just anxiety in the day to day of trying to parent a highly

sensitive little soul who, as I always described,

...