has anyone seen my hobby?
never thought the hardest question
would be asking myself what I actually “liked” to do
*Note: If you are feeling depressed, or just had a baby and think you might be feeling creeping shadows of PPD looming around the corner. Talk to someone. Preferably a professional, but anyone will do, as long as you know they will be honest with you. These days there are podcasts that I’ve found that actually get. real. about. it. You aren’t a bad mom. You aren’t alone. Below is just a sliver of my own experience spanning from 2020 - 2023, I do get real but also have kept a level of digression for my own privacy and this is just a representation of me-on-the-other-side of the monster known as PPD.
“So Darcy, tell me, what do you like to do for fun? What are your hobbies?”
It was somewhere around November of 2021. I was sitting in a psychologist’s office, who would soon become “my” psychologist, at the referral of my counselor/therapist (who had become like a mother to me here). Why? Because after months of seeing my therapist one-to-two-times-a-month, my postpartum-depression was still holding my head under the water. Except by this point my daughter was almost eight-months-old and we were starting to face the fact that this might just be plain old depression brought on by PPD. Seriously? Can’t I just “cheer up” and “pull myself from the bootstraps” to get out of this mental crisis? I don’t have time for this.
Everything about the way I was feeling was a Looney Toons sized anvil on my chest. Always a wear-my-heart-on-my-sleeve kind of gal, and very easily brought to tears during those Publix Thanksgiving commercials, I’m what you’d call “sensitive” for sure. Moody? Sure. But clinically depressed?? Nah.
How could it be possible that while living in the literal Italian countryside, with my dream husband and my beautiful, healthy blonde-haired-blue-eyed baby girl, that this would be the chapter of my life drowning in this vicious monster known as depression.
I can’t stress enough how badly I wanted to will the way I felt away. I had everything I had ever wanted in my hands and I knew my time living in Italy would be limited. With the COVID travel restrictions beginning to lift at this time during 2021, I couldn’t be bothered with feeling like this. I wanted to melt away into nothing. I felt trapped, dark, and unsafe when alone with myself. But unfortunately for anyone familiar with what I’m describing, you also know that nothing outside of yourself can heal what’s happening within.
It’s not that I wasn’t prepared for the possibility of PPD, plenty of warnings are placed in front of a new mom’s face during and after the process of bringing a human into the world. But it still blindsided me. Here I was exercising myself to the bone nine-months-straight because I wanted to “bounce back” into my “old body, pre-baby” only to find that weeks after she was born I would stand naked in front of the mirror in my bedroom, see that my body was totally back to normal (with a badass new scar). On the outside I had bounced back! Go me! But inside?
Inside that girl’s head was a goddam waking nightmare.
So I sat there in the psychologist’s office on one of those “leather” couches that squeak when you move, a paper COVID mask on my face dampened by tears, completely stumped. What DO I like to do for fun? I know I used to have hobbies. Where did they go? My brain was a flashing text cursor on a white page. Blank. In my silence, she assured me that it was okay to not have an answer right now, but that I should think about it more and find something for myself. Maybe something I used to like? That could be a good start.
Several (several…) months later, back in my therapist’s office (on a non-squeaky-couch), I explained to her that while I was feeling “better”, I still felt like a stranger to myself. Here I was, emerging from almost a year of therapy work, so far away from the person who once found herself staring at the ground from the top floor of her house wondering, “Hm. If I land just right, from here, do you think that would do the trick?” An internal dialogue with myself that wasn’t me. Wasn’t my voice. Wasn’t my choices, wasn’t what I wanted. But that monster on my back had me convinced that this life would be better without me in it.
Endless amounts of work went into shutting that bitch up. She was gone. I was here (and always will be). But something I couldn’t place or pinpoint still felt unfamiliar. I told my therapist that I wished there was a Cosmopolitan survey that could help re-introduce myself to myself. I googled everything I could, but came up empty handed. So instead, she helped me. She designed a questionnaire for me to complete to meet me, again*.
Now I am a very quantitive, measured, person. I like knowing I did a good job and the best way for me to comprehend that is by having a scale or structure to grade myself against. So this homework was p-e-r-f-e-t-t-o for me. I waited until my little critter was asleep, plugged in my headphones, put on some music, and dug in. The first five questions had my fingers gliding over the keyboard. This was a breeze. And then I hit Question Six:
“Before you were married, before you had Rylee, when you were working how did you care for yourself emotionally, mentally and physically?”
AKA, a more eloquent way of asking me… “What do you like to do, Darcy? Do you have any hobbies?”
Goddammit, here it is again. That f*cking question. And here I was again, stumped. I searched my brain because at least this time being asked this question I wasn’t on a squeaky couch and could take my time answering. I used to love ballet, it consumed my life for years, was that it? No. Reading? Sure, but I never made time for that back then. Drinking wine alone at home on my couch while replying to e-mails at 11pm and having popcorn for dinner… does that count? Because I did a lot of that back in 2018.
Eventually after playing the same Sylvan Esso song on repeat a few times, I had an answer and it went like this: “Honestly when I was working - that’s almost ALL that I did. It is what fueled me emotionally and mentally. My successes at work are what gave me a high, and a place in this world. I attributed it ALL to my career. My career was my baby. It was my family, my lover, my best friend. I had a very unhealthy balance in my life back then, I know that now and honestly I knew that then too.”
I know what you’re thinking: Damn, DJ, that’s bleak.
So… even when the only human I had to care for was myself, had zero diapers to change, had all the time in the world, and could sleep 8-hours-a-night, every night. I still didn’t make time for myself. Cool. Cool. Cool.
If not for living in a country where my Soggiorno does not allow me to work or make any kind of profit without risking legal ramifications, the easy solution here would be for my to just get a job and #werk. But since that was my hurdle I had to get creative. Luckily for me Question Three on the survey clearly identified that I found 1.) Creativity and 3.) Adaptability to be my strongest attributes, so I was pretty sure I could figure out a solution eventually.
Now ask yourself, dear reader: What would you do with your life even if you couldn’t get paid for it?
The 2019 version of myself would say “absolutely nothing, my time is worth a six-figure-salary, benefits and a competitive bonus structure.” This is where I hit you with the annoying fact that living in Italy really does change the way you see value in your life. I used to attach so much happiness to stuff, things, a full calendar. I think it’s because that was what I was surrounded by so now after a couple years of being surrounded by people who DON’T value those things at all, it’s no wonder that my fundamentals have shifted.
My neighbors have been living in these homes and farming this earth for generations. Centuries. The walls, the furniture, the recipes are all worn in and built to last for their children and children’s children and so on. They don’t really value excess in the way I’d been conditioned to. They do more with less and take care of what they already have instead of looking for what else they “need.”
That hard-hitting-initial question was asked to me in November 2021 and I wish I could tell you that it didn’t take me long to figure out the answer.
But it did. Countless highs and lows, doubts in myself and what-the-F-am-I-doing-with-my-life moments fell between then and now. By February of this year, almost two years since being diagnosed with PPD, I had successfully incorporated some legit hobbies into my life that served me. This shit takes time. Slowly but surely new habits have been formed. I realized that somewhere along the way I stopped caring about what I liked to do, period. Hobbies felt childish to me, like something I had the privilege of having as a kid but didn’t deserve as an adult.
So what’s the answer now? Well, waking up early and meditating with my husband. I do a lot of hiking and rucking in the woods near home. Reading is back in my life, and had re-emerged since my Dad’s death to help me cope with the loss. Taking a cue from all the farmers around me, I’ve picked up gardening to see if I could grow some food for my kid. And finally: I bake bread. Sourdough to be exact. Which happened out of necessity because it’s near impossible to find it in Italy, and my husband and I had an overwhelming craving. A classic supply and demand scenario developed from there…
I’ve mentioned this before, but if you told the old version of me that I’d be happiest nurturing sourdough starters and making bread for people, I’d have laughed at you. And not in a cute way, in a snobby-I’m-above-it way. I worked with my brain, my finely tuned strategic thinking, brain… not my hands. No no no. Little did I know that the greatest meditation and the greatest therapy for me in the end would be using my hands to knead and fold dough, combining literally just two ingredients together, into a gorgeous loaf of tangy bread. It’s humbled me in a way I couldn’t have expected. Months and months of practicing later, once I gave my “work” an A+ (quantitative and measured as I am), I put the word out there. And much to my surprise, the orders came in…
And they haven’t stopped.
I can’t make profit. I can only charge for materials and utilities costs. My time is worth nothing of monetary value, and yet I am getting more out of this new “work” than I’ve ever known before.
Prior to that first week, I had never made more than two loaves at once with only one at a time fitting into my tiny Italian oven. And now I’m cranking out up to sixteen loaves a week, sometimes more. This feeling of being placed at the center of American and Italian families homes has enveloped me. Waking up at 4am to get started is my routine. What I thought would just be a one time, maybe once a week thing, has bloomed into a steady Monday-thru-Friday process that genuinely makes me happy. And no one is more surprised than me.
I’m Darcy Jane, but everyone calls me DJ. And I’m a baker.