A few years ago, I wrote a book about my postpartum depression. It was a book of mostly vibes, not a confession, so, for the first time I am saying here that after I had my baby I didn’t want to be alive. The depression was making me suggestible, soft and sticky, everything bothered me, made me scared and desperate. I couldn’t get the world off me. My reasoning was simple: in death, one sloughs off the world, or death is the only way to get free of it. Why did I even think this, having never died before in my life? I had been in proximity to others’ deaths, and I can tell you that if those people were done with the world, the world was certainly not done with them. We are always relating to them. They are breaking our hearts.

Eventually I learned that after you have a baby you’re not really clinging to the world, and the world isn’t really clinging to you. The world is inside of you, and you are inside of it. It’s like you get the baby out of you and the world fills the vacancy. So, when you want to die, it’s not a one-of-us-must-go situation. It’s like we’re either together or we’re nothing at all. This made me mad, I’ll admit. All I wanted was to be released from the astonishing responsibility, yet I could not get out of the world I created without taking that world with me. That beautiful, perfect world that did not ask for its existence yet was so various, complex, and unknown. I knew that to die was to destroy life, not just mine, and I didn’t want to do that.

I do not think we understand this like we should: my life is both mine, and yours. When I had my babies, I knew I was suddenly caring for completely autonomous beings, beings whose trajectory, whose entire life cycles, would be dedicated to moving away from me, and yet it was also clear that their lives were entangled with mine, that my life made theirs possible and that this entwinement will never end. But I didn’t just feel this way about my children. I felt this way about everything. Huge forests, obviously, but also people I could barely stand, people who had done awful things, objects, ugly ones, houses, the smells emanating from them, bindweed, bees, even wasps and earwigs, trillions of pine needles, the sky, its ash. 

My husband Alex does not like when I talk about my death. I understand. My child has identified a way to hurt me—to evoke in anger her nonexistence. God, it is painful. What if tomorrow we attach to the things of this world and then the things of this world go away? Maybe what I had been feeling all along was love, deformed, of course, by my mind, but love nonetheless.

I told myself I would not talk about the weather, but how could I not mention that last year it did not snow until New Year’s Eve, the day after a fire incinerated a suburb of Denver? We could see the fire on the horizon, as we had seen so many fires on the wooded foothills. It was the first time, though, that we saw fire on the horizon of neighborhoods, shopping centers, and four-lane roads. It was coming for us. Not the destruction of the world but the world itself, as we had made it. We give birth to the world, and yet it is alive and always changing. There is no amount of cloud seeding or nuclear energy that can undo what we have done.

Last year, I felt something that resembled my postpartum depression. I was full of despair. I was already missing human love. That’s what despair does to you. But then, by some miracle, I was given the opportunity to teach incarcerated students. Apocalypse is not more apocalyptic than a prison. And so I found a way to enter the dark and to find in it hope, and not just the concept of hope but people, who we had plunged into darkness, hoping and loving and working through their shit, which is really unlike any kind of shit I have ever known. The worst, and I say this especially to my White friends living the US, the worst has already happened.

Must I come at connection so dismally? From the very point of annihilation?  I wonder if Alex asks this about me or if my friend Kelly, who is always so hopeful even though she’s a farmer, gets tired of me. Despite being such a downer, or maybe because I’m such a downer, I’ve come to know that every path leads to our unity with one another, even the darkest path. I have planted gardens, I mean literally, I have planted lots of flowers, I have watched bees very closely, like my own heart, white moths, like my belief, and I have seen in these gardens my neighbor’s garbage tipped over and blowing, snagging in the stalks of lily and Dane’s Blood and milkweed, and I have delicately extracted it. I have helped a person who killed her own baby. She threw that baby over a fence to freeze, and I showed her kindness, and she arrived for me amid the catastrophe of her existence receptive and grateful. We were for one another a miracle.

My sense of responsibility for the things I love is a torch. The things I love are in me, and I am in them. The things I love are sometimes pretty, but they are often just things. Things that could never exist anywhere else but in this world as it is. The only way to get to the end of this world is to go through it.

J’Lyn Chapman is a writer, teacher, artist, and the author of To Limn / Lying In, winner of the PANK Nonfiction Book Contest (2020), Beastlife (Calamari Archive, 2016), and the chapbooks A Thing of Shreds and Patches (Essay Press, 2016) and Bear Stories (Calamari Press 2008). She also curated the interview chapbook The Form Our Curiosity Takes (Essay Press 2015). Chapman currently coordinates the MA in Creative Writing, Literature, and Pedagogy Specializations at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. You can learn more at her website jlynchapman.com.