“I remember I was just like, ‘I have to survive the night,’ ” Bliss says on her podcast
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Bliss Poureetezadi Goytowski is opening up about her journey with postpartum depression.
On an episode of her podcast Blind Love with Zack & Bliss, the Love Is Blind alum spoke for the first time about her experience with postpartum depression after welcoming baby daughter Galileo earlier this year with husband Zack Goytowski.
Poureetezadi Goytowksi prefaced the conversation by saying that she has a history of depression, so when she was pregnant with her daughter, they had a very candid conversation about knowing the signs of postpartum depression.
“I kind of have a history of depression. And when I was pregnant with Galileo, we talked a lot about what are the signs of postpartum depression, what’s our plan, how can we prevent me from getting it. What are we going to do if I do get it? I feel like we tried to come prepared,” she began.
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“And when Galileo was born, it was so magical. I’ve always wanted to be a mom. It was something I knew I was meant to do on this planet,” Poureetezadi Goytowksi said. “And I’m a little bit of an older mom, I had my first baby at 34 and I waited a long time for this.”
“It’s supposed to be the most happy time of your life when you have your baby, or at least that’s what society tells you and that’s the expectation that I had. And I was happy. She is the biggest blessing in my life. And I got some pretty bad depression.”
Poureetezadi Goytowksi went on to say that she didn’t realize it was creeping in, speaking with her husband Goytowski about how “things were off” and she wasn’t initially ready to face what was happening.
“The nighttime, I remember, I was just like I have to survive the night. I had such bad night scaries,” she remembered. “I had to tell myself the morning will come and you just have to get through the night.”
“I had this beautiful baby that I loved so much and I imagined my experience so different,” Poureetezadi Goytowski said. “I remember smiling at her probably creepily because I was just trying to be happy and smiled at her.”
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“All I did was smile at her. And I would wake up in the morning and I would be like, ‘I have to survive the day. I have to survive. This baby needs me. And it was really hard. It was just really dark.”
Poureetezadi Goytowski continued, saying that for her, depression became tied to feelings of shame and guilt.
“I was really depressed and I had some shame a little bit around it because, again, I’d been waiting for this my whole entire life. And for this beautiful blessing,” she explained.
“Not everyone has an easy path to having kids, some people never have that dream come true. What’s wrong with me? Why am I having such a hard time?”
She explained that part of her difficulty was in breastfeeding her daughter, which caused sleep deprivation as she searched for ways to teach herself and her daughter how to do it.
“It just was like major survival mode. That’s all it was, me just trying to survive. And I felt like sometimes I wouldn’t be able to survive,” Poureetezadi Goytowski recalled.
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“I’m so thankful my mom was able to be here for a long period of time. I think that helped us so much and then when she had to leave, that was just really hard. And I just felt so bad, like that Galileo deserved so much better than what I was giving her. I could barely get up out of bed in the morning.”
Eventually, Poureetezadi Goytowski talked with her doctor and decided to get on medication.
“She was just like, ‘This happens to some people and we need to get you on some medication.’ And I got the medication prescribed and then I came home and didn’t fill it for a couple weeks,” she remembered.
“And I wish I had filled it earlier, because it would’ve helped me be better earlier. And medication’s not always the answer and medication doesn’t always work, but for me it did and I needed that to rebalance myself.”
“It’s almost hard for me sometimes to look back and relate to that person that I was during those first couple months of Galileo’s life. It feels like it was a dream that I’m looking back on,” Poureetezadi Goytowski said. “It got really dark.”
“I remember just trying to look at Galileo and be like, ‘My daughter needs me,'” she said. “And she saved me. She really did. I am still here because of her.”
