My darling friends! Hello!
I’m back from vacation in Portugal! So much to tell you! So many “!!!”s I’ve also missed you a lot which feels weird to say but is true! I hope you kind of missed me which is also weird but I also hope it’s true.
Anyways! Here is the headline of the trip for now: I took myself on a honeymoon to Portugal and it was one of the best trips of my life. I indulged myself the way I wanted to be indulged because, frankly, no one has ever treated me the way I would want to be treated. Including me. Again, SO much more to come but for my first week back I wanted to introduce to you one of my favorite people of ALL time, Hitha Palepu.
Hitha is the ultimate multi-hyphenate: she’s the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, runs her own (awesome, highly recommended) newsletter, is the author of two books (one that teaches you how to pack which I’m obsessed with and the other about life lessons we can all learn from Kamala Harris), she’s a style icon (just look at her IG), a mother, a wife, and, and, and, all of the things…just thinking about her day makes me exhausted.
On the outside, Hitha looks like the person you want to be, utterly elegant, super smart, with an excellent book recommendation at the ready, but for this week’s newsletter she’s letting us in a little deeper. She’s going to talk to us about how she got through a depression this summer. It was brought on, partially, by a post-hysterectomy recovery. I don’t think people talk enough about how medical ailments wreak havoc on our mental health! When you don’t feel well, you don’t feel well.
She also is honest that summer is not always easy, despite what we see on social media. I needed Hitha’s advice because personally, August is always a little depressing to me. I think it’s because I know the summer is coming to a close and with it all the unrealistic expectations I had for it (learn a new language, re-arrange my apartment, meet the love of my life, the small stuff).
So, this edition of the newsletter goes out to anyone feeling down and like they need some company, compassion, and practical f*cking steps to make it back up to the sunlight.
Healing summer ick, a guest post from Hitha Palepu:
Hello, new friend. How are you? Have you drank water today? Can you take a second to stretch your arms over your head, and roll your shoulders back a couple of times?
Why don’t you curl up in a more comfortable chair? I can wait.
Aaah. That feels better.
I’m Hitha, and it’s very nice to meet you. I’m a fan-turned-friend of Tara’s (Lilies helped me through a major burnout spell of mine last spring, and Glow has been my constant re-read/re-listen during some tough moments of 2023). One of my highlights of this year was enjoying tea with Tara (sipping the literal beverage, spilling the metaphorical kind) as we talked all about Vanderpump Rules (this was right before the reunion, which we opined on ad nauseum), our weird multi-hyphenated careers and the ups and downs of them, books we’d loved lately, more reality television talk, and we left with a promise of my visiting LA and us enjoying Something About Her’s sandwiches - whenever the store opens.
That afternoon was one of my favorite memories of the year, and one I revisit when things are feeling icky. Despite appearances (like my Instagram feed), this has been an icky summer. There have been some absolutely wonderful moments to celebrate my friends and enjoy some incredible experiences…but there’s also been a ride on the depression roller coaster, self-time outs when I’ve been on the verge of losing it with my family, and some ugly cry sessions.
Some of the ick is due to my post-hysterectomy recovery. I’ve had severe postpartum depression after the birth of my first son and post-miscarriage, and prenatal depression during my pregnancy with my second son. The 6-week post-surgery mark is when my neurochemicals decide to visit Disney World and ride Space Mountain over and over again, and it makes sense that they decided to repeat this vacation a month and half after my uterus was evicted.
My neurochemicals love chaos.
I’m grateful that my dad let me cry over his world famous nachos as I connected the dots between my feeling on the verge of a depressive episode and my recent surgery, and I’m even more grateful for an OB-GYN who promptly connected me with a perinatal psychiatrist. Just booking the appointment felt like a weight was lifted from my shoulders, and it also served as a reminder to downshift into a gentle phase - and not just a Gentle Wednesday (it’s a thing, I’ll explain more in a bit).
The workforce as a whole (and especially the millennial generation, with sandwich caregiving responsibilities on top of work) has hit peak burnout, which Anne Helen Petersen and Rainsford Stauffer unpack and analyze beautifully. At a personal level, it’s something I feel while benefiting from tremendous privilege - financial security between my husband and my incomes, incredible teams at work and home to help us carry the load, and incredibly supportive parents (on both sides) who jump in at a moment’s notice. This privilege has also been a minor factor in the guilt I feel about my mental health struggles - the “what do you have to be depressed about?” narrative continues to ring in my head during my low moments, plunging me deeper into the spiral of sadness and lack of control.
If only I had a punch card for this spiral. I’ve definitely earned a free latte by now.
I remember how scared I felt during my first visits down this spiral. There’s a fear that this is your life now, and you’ll never feel the elated highs that preceded them again (or feel joy again), and that this is who you are now and you need to make peace with it. It’s a shitty, shitty place to be - but I promise you it’s not your metaphorical home or where you deserve to be.
Mental rock bottom is not the Hotel California. You can - and you will - leave for better and brighter places.
This visit was a pretty short one - a club soda-lime-bitters-in-a-wine-glass at the lobby bar, if you will. Since this recent spiral is fresh in my head, I want to share some of the tactics that help me process and start the slow climb up:
Don’t go it alone. Talk to your therapist, ask for a psychiatrist referral and get evaluated for medication. I wish this wasn’t such a luxury and rather treated as the necessity that it is, but that’s an entirely other newsletter. You wouldn’t give yourself a root canal or a pap, so please take this same approach when it comes to your mental health. I’ve had success in finding therapists who accepted my insurance (even my old, paltry Obamacare policy) on Headway and Alma.
Cultivate your gentle practices. Our family practices Gentle Wednesdays every week - it’s a day we (namely, I) lighten our load and treat ourselves to a couple of things that help reset the week. I treat myself to a coffee from our local coffee shop and read for a bit before I log into therapy, we order pizza for ourselves and the kids for dinner, and I try to carve out an hour midday to do something I want to do. If my schedule and energy permit, I sometimes treat myself to a Broadway matinee or a museum visit during the afternoon.
Prioritize your mental release valves daily. We all have our indulgences that help pause our brains and act as mental release valves. Mine are romance novels and Bravo reality shows, and I feel no guilt when I read or watch them. Prioritizing them in the snippets of time I have during the day and every evening helps me show up sharper and happier every morning (after my coffee), and I make no secret of them or have any shame towards them.
Unplug - literally. I delete my social media apps from my phone every weekend, put my phone in a drawer during my mornings and evenings with my kids, and my phone goes on grayscale mode every evening (which really does make mindless scrolling less engaging). I also use the app One Sec to act as a “are you sure you want to open Instagram?” firewall, to help moderate my scrolling time during the day. These rules work for me, but play around and figure out what kind of unplugging works for you.
Do a dopamine recalibration. The algorithms that drive these platforms are designed to spike and crash your dopamine levels so you keep opening and scrolling the app, which leaves you exhausted and listless and feeling like shit. When you have the urge to scroll, can you swap that habit for something that offers a more gentle dopamine lift and letdown? I have the interests of a 80-something woman and love to crochet and needlepoint, and I keep my current project or my Kindle within reach and carry it with me at all times so I have my better-for-you dopamine option with me at all times. I will confess that this takes some time to establish new habits and I’m still working on it, but it’s really helped me feel more balanced.
I don’t want to overstay my welcome, so I’ll leave with my deepest thanks for welcoming me into your inbox and for Tara’s gracious hospitality. You can find me on Instagram and Threads. If you’d like me to keep visiting your inbox, you can sign up for the daily #5SmartReads newsletter here, or get the weekly digest here.
Glow on, my friend. And take care of yourself.
Love Hitha and this was a great read!
I love the dopamine recalibration idea. I, too, have the interests of an 80-year-old woman, at least when it comes to knitting. I forget about it in the summer, but I just might bring out a project to work on in lieu of YouTube and see how that goes!