I fell off

TLDR; for a little while I experienced ~experience~ without the pathos or hubris

Around this time last year, I stopped posting my usual long-reads on instagram. Usually tangentially bike-related, I think I used ig posts as a way to parse my experiences and share my thoughts along with attempting something approaching aestheticism. Stopping posting wasn’t a conscious decision - I would think about sharing thoughts and photos but never hit ‘share’. And it happened (or didn’t) long before we fell pregnant. When I made a mountain biking instagram for specific MTB influencer posting and made my original account private. Then I was caught between wanting a private space for me - more fool me for trying to influence without a plan - and not knowing what that looked like after collecting so many internet friends in doing so. Whatever the reason, I went to ground as far as my heart-on-sleeve, stream-of-consciousness long posts went.

And then I was pregnant and burrowed deeper. And honestly, I feel like all the well-meaning words, the kind-and-interested but nearly-probing questions and all the social media snippets of other people’s lives led to some (heightened) anxiety bordering on superstition and a quiet introspection that had me holding my proverbial cards to my chest. Now I think about it, I was overwhelmed by all the good intentions - the advice, the must-buys, ‘this is what we did’, the kindly inquiries about my body and my unborn baby and a life I hadn’t lived yet.

And now I realise I was seeking privacy to protect a vulnerability I have never felt before. Not because those inquiries and that community was unwelcome. Simply to quietly experience a changing body, mind and marriage, to wonder how those things would change again and again, and to just be in each of those things as they were.

Truthfully, it feels like my brain took its leave really early on in pregnancy, and actually I think that was for the best because it was a blissful time. No early daycare inspections, no baby shower, no solid plan for mat leave, no themed nursery. I shared what I could about the whole shebang and went to work as a lawyer and did cases (some of them about birth and labour gone wrong) and tried to do one day at a time while counting the weeks and months forwards and backwards.

And now we’re on the other side. Where every day is an adventure made of ever-differing variations of the same three activities and all the cliches are true. Where I’m still holding onto the solitude I built around us, before we became an us of 3, maybe even more than before. Where the shape of time is bent and doesn’t mean what it used to and doesn’t really matter and where my brain probably still isn’t but where my little family is, our hearts fiercely beating against the cold outside.