Tag Archives: Mental Health

Mental Health and Woman on the Edge

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Thanks to Canada Council, The Writers’ Union of Canada and Simon & Schuster Canada, Samantha M. Bailey, author of the #1 national bestseller Woman on the Edge, will be visiting Vaughan Public Libraries’ Adult Book Club on May 20, 2021. I wanted to invite Samantha for two reasons: first, she’s originally from Thornhill and used to frequent the Bathurst Clark Resource Library (had I met her already?!); second, while many would agree that her bestselling title is most successful in the gripping pace, nonetheless it promotes mental health awareness in a way, just in time for the Mental Health Awareness Week in May.

I’d save most of the conversation about this intriguing psychological thriller and Samantha’s creative process for the event night. But if you can’t wait, take a quick peek at our Vaughan Reads video :)! Don’t forget to register on Eventbrite and enjoy an evening with Samantha on May 20!book cover of Woman on the Edge

Here, I’d like to talk more about mental health. Although Samantha’s writing emphasized more on creating a suspenseful page turner than exploring the matter of mental health, postpartum depression was one of the sources that had inspired her work. Her depiction of the protagonist Nicole Markham’s postpartum depression symptoms is absorbing. I’m pretty sure it resonates with many mothers. I myself had experienced a long period of postpartum blue after I had my first child. Without any social support (no parents, no friends nearby, only a husband as inexperienced as I was), brand-new motherhood had struck me with far more anxiety than joy. Even now, I can still vividly recall how strange my feeling was when I first saw my son’s wrinkly, bruised face when he had finally been suctioned and forcepped out of me after thirty-six hours of induction and labour – my heart raced with panic and wondered if I could have returned him like returning a wrong-sized T-shirt, and that feeling had caused guilt in me in every single second of the next six weeks. I still remember I would wake up every twenty minutes at night, gasping, worrying that my son’s little life would go cold before I could enjoy it. I would constantly get up to check on his breathing, never mind he was always hungry and woke me up every one or two hours to be fed, while my body was still experiencing  severe pain from the traumatic delivery. Anxiety prevailed. Depression followed. The beginning of my motherhood was ever rough! Fortunately, the chemicals in my brain didn’t act up, and my symptoms gradually dispersed as my son became more playful about six weeks later.

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Cottagecore

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modern cottage gardenIt’s well into December, the air is icy, and the treetops are dusted white. Have you got chestnuts roasting on an open fire yet? This may be the only time of year that actually suits quarantine: cozying up with a good book and a hot cup of cocoa (well, except for all the holiday parties we’re missing out on—but let’s not talk about that). 2020 has been a year of many things, most of them truly awful, but one positive trend that has emerged from the rubble is something called cottagecore. If you’ve ever dreamed of giving it all up and running away to the woods, or of having your own thriving vegetable garden, or of days spent baking bread and tending to plants, then you’ve been dreaming of the cottagecore ideal! 

So what exactly is this “cottagecore” all the kids are going on about? The New York Times describes it as “an aspirational form of nostalgia that praises the benefits of living a slow life in which nothing much happens at all.” It’s basically like living inside the Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley games; perfect, fictional worlds in which your only responsibilities are tending to crops, raising animals, making friends, and decorating your house. Your cottage will most likely be in an open field, or in the woods, or perhaps by a small village where you can pop into some locally owned shops. It is, essentially, the antithesis of our hectic, technology-based, urban lives. 

Of course, like all things, cottagecore is not even close to being a new concept—what’s old is new, and what’s new is old. The term itself is new, a thoroughly modern invention combining the obvious “cottage” with the suffix “–core”, denoting a genre (derived from “hardcore”, which in the past 30 years has given itself to endless genres: softcore, mumblecore, normcore, the list goes on). But the concept of eschewing modernity and returning to nature is older than dirt. Back in the day, the general term was “the pastoral”, which mostly applied to literature that idolized country life. Romanticism (with a capital R) was a prevailing artistic trend in the 19th century, and was “suffused with reverence for the natural world”. In William Wordsworth’s famous “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, the poet describes the peace he feels when thinking back on a field of daffodils blowing in the breeze. 

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Break the Silence

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Image result for bell lets talk 2020In the Harry Potter universe, a sense of cold, creeping dread announces the arrival of Dementors, foul creatures of darkness who sweep away happiness and deal in despair. “Get too near a Dementor,” Professor Lupin tells Harry in The Prisoner of Azkaban, “and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you.” Dementors might be real, dangerous monsters for our wizard hero, but for author JK Rowling, Dementors are an avatar for depression. While writing the beloved series, Rowling was suffering from a bout of depression herself, which she described as “that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad.” This, incidentally, is almost exactly how Lupin describes Dementors to Harry. 

Unfortunately for us Muggles living in a boring, non-magical world, things like depression don’t exist in a solid form. We can’t shout “expecto patronum!” at mental illness and chase it away with a helpful Patronus. But there are some steps we can take to combat it, such as the simplest, most obvious, but often most difficult starting point: talking about it. When Harry faints upon his first encounter with a Dementor, he is filled with shame. Nobody else is fainting, so why is he? It isn’t until Professor Lupin opens the door to a conversation that Harry learns why he is so affected by the creatures, and how to fight them off. Today is Bell Let’s Talk Day, a day dedicated to breaking the silence on mental illness through conversation on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and text messaging with the hashtag #BellLetsTalk. 

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