Almost two years ago, I wrote my first blog post. As soon as it went live, I thought, I have quite possibly just ruined my entire life. This was about a year after I went home sick from my job and then never went back. The whole experience still felt painfully raw. I was filled [...]
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I get a lot of emails from women about what it’s like for them to try to work and be mothers. Every once in a while I post them with the author’s permission, like this one from Tennessee, and this one from Baltimore. I think it’s important to share these stories, because it shines a [...]
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I just stumbled across an interesting story about the term ‘nervous breakdown‘ that came out in The New York Times last year. It explains why the term fell out of favor decades ago with psychiatrists, who now prefer labels like ‘anxiety disorder,’ ‘depression,’ or ‘schizophrenia’ when diagnosing patients. But the term ‘nervous breakdown’ is still [...]
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I recently got an email from a blog reader who said she had been obsessively reading and re-reading my first post, and all the comments that followed it. I wanted to include an excerpt of her email here, but wasn’t able to get in touch with her to get permission. (If you’re out there, my [...]
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My first semester in grad school for journalism, more than a decade ago, was a shock. Boom! Right from the beginning we had daily story deadlines. Each of us desperately wanted to prove ourselves to be the next Edward R. Murrow. None of us knew what we were doing. We were awestruck by our professors, [...]
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I had a truly crappy Mother’s Day this year. I think Anna Jarvis would understand. Inspired by her own mother’s life, she started a campaign in 1907 to recognize mothers for their contribution to society. She was successful in making Mother’s Day a national holiday, but then spent the rest of her life fighting its [...]
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I have heard from dozens of women over the last year who had some version of a nervous breakdown while working and raising kids, or came very close to one. Some were already friends. Others I met through the blog. There are a lot of us out there. But so far, no one has written [...]
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My interview with Lady Brain aired Monday on KUSF 90.3 FM in San Francisco. We talked about the perils of working and raising a family. I think I was supposed to give advice to working moms about how to avoid a nervous breakdown, but as you know, my credibility is a little suspect here… The [...]
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