Molly Wizenberg, restaurateur & author of the blog Orangette and the book A Homemade Life, wrote in her blog this week about being diagnosed with postpartum depression:

When I was diagnosed, and when I was first trying to make sense of it, what I wanted most was to talk with another woman who had been through it and come out the other side, someone who could reassure me with full confidence that it wouldn’t be a permanent condition. I knew that logically, intellectually, but THE HORMONES, they pull the wool over your eyes, and the wool, whoa, it is heavy.

The postpartum depression wool. It’s so heavy and thick it convinces you that you aren’t the person you’ve been all your life. You must have been someone else all along that was just waiting to come out. It was all a ruse until now. The real you is easily overwhelmed, incapable of being a parent or enjoying motherhood, inadequate, and all those other words you use to flagellate yourself.

Postpartum depression is such a convincing liar. Just as Lance Armstrong is coming out this week to admit, after all this time, that he lied and lied and lied — so forcefully that we wanted to believe him — the truth comes out for us too. We aren’t defective. We’re the people we’ve always been and we will return.