Poet Emory Hall On Womanhood, Postpartum Depression, and Grief
A conversation about embracing all the women you've been
I have rarely felt my age. After my mom died when I was ten years old, I felt so much older so quickly, and it never stopped until this past year. At 30, I’ve caught up with myself simply because I stopped trying to move so fast. I stopped trying to predict the future, and I accepted my past and my mom’s past. I moved at the pace that my current self allowed. I didn’t figure out the secret to being present; I just stopped punishing myself for not knowing, and living became easier.
I was eight months into embracing life as it came when I stumbled upon Emory Hall’s poetry book, ‘Made of Rivers.’ Hall writes about life as a human who is grieving (through various stages of her life), about her experience with early motherhood, and about being a woman in a world that makes it really hard to do so.
I kickoff our podcast conversation by reading her poem, “i have been a thousand different women” out loud:
Here’s what Hall had to say about about some of these topics:
Womanhood
“One of the difficult things that I had was reconciling with versions of myself that I didn’t necessarily love or parts of myself that I wasn’t proud of when I was super lost and going through difficult times in my life. I think there are parts in our lives when we’re lost, and that’s okay, and it’s okay to have worn a hundred different masks and tried on different versions of yourself because it just gets you to where you are now.”
Grief
“I think that the modern world really misses something with grief in that it’s this finite experience of we’re grieving, and then we’re done grieving. What I’ve realized in my own journey is that grief never actually leaves us, and it’s not that we’re damned with this death sentence of grief. It’s that it stays with us and metamorphosizes.”
Modern Self-Care Culture
“The wellness, health and spiritual culture that it’s in the masses right now, there’s this idea that we can be healed, not grow old and walk through this world knowing the meaning of it, [like] we’ve got [all] the answers, and it just does such a disservice.”
Motherhood
“One of the most shocking parts of becoming a mother that no one prepared me for was how much grief is intertwined with motherhood. When I started talking about it, like, ‘Hey, I walked out of my birth experience with trauma, into postpartum with postpartum depression, anxiety, OCD, and had an enormous amount of grief grieving my former life, my body, and mental health,’ [so] many people shared that they had gone through a similar thing. Why are we not talking about this more?”
I slow clapped through so many sections of our conversation, these quotes are just the tip of the iceberg. You can listen to my full conversation with Emory Hall on Happy To Be Here.