when sadness had no bottom or top, i found solace in a word.

an introduction, postpartum depression & a new found love of books.

Atlas 2 years old — Newland, North Carolina (2024)

an introduction:

My Instagram handle has been internetbby for well over a decade. This is not an exaggeration, I found myself exploring the seedy underbelly of the internet at quite a young age, if I’m being honest probably too young of an age. But what pre-teen wasn’t doing this same exact thing? My first time being grounded, I had been caught talking to an online boyfriend I’d found through IMVU. In the spirit of oversharing, I sent him fake pictures of myself. I never knew much about my internet boyfriend other than he was a white boy named Anthony from Angrier, North Carolina and he worked at a HWY 55 Burger, Shakes and Fries. 

I’d become a case study for why bored children do not belong on the internet. For the entirety of my 7th grade year I spent my days afraid Max and Nev of the MTV show Catfish (an un-veiler of fake internet personas), would peel themselves out of my television and find their way to my doorstep, with my love interest in tow. I had no clue what I’d say upon being confronted. Handheld cameras racking into focus to reveal a twelve-year-old black girl peeking through a storm door with an uneven texturizer, wearing baggy plaid shorts, sporting an ill-fitting Aeropostale T-shirt — her face blurred for legal reasons. Luckily, that never transpired as my mother went through my texts and brought the relationship to an abrupt close (she texted that man and told him that I’m twelve and to never reach out to me again or she’d call the police). Bottom line, I was humiliated.

I never thought about my internet lover again. Until recently, I remembered his last name and I was able to find him via Facebook. He looked exactly as I remembered him from a decade ago, just a bit older. Judging from optics, he was pretty honest about who he was and where he was. My sleuthing resulted in me finding out we now have more in common than we did previously. We are now both parents.

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The internet has become a vessel for so many of my strangest interactions, as well as a reservoir for my interests. Art, films, romance, religion, food, image making, books etc. This was the reason why I’ve been unable to relinquish myself of the username @internetbby, at my core I am a child of the internet.

I am 25 now, indisputably a grown woman. It is a social requirement that I make a Substack - a blog that exists as an archive to hold my musings on life and the media I consume. 

So, let’s get on with it.

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Atlas 1 week old - NICU born at 28 weeks (2022)

captive maternal:

In 2022 I gave birth to a son. His name is Atlas and he turned two in March. He is a Pisces who loves the puppet Elmo and he is the spitting image of his father. But if you look at him closely, you’ll notice he has my eyes and the same sandy brown hair. I didn’t have too much time to think about the kind of parent I would be, because as quickly as I found myself in the family way, I just as quickly found myself giving birth. A strange birth, following a car-pile up. Blood in the crotch of my underwear. Seven layers of skin peeled back and sown together again in under 30 minutes. Suddenly a two-pound baby boy is born, looking anything but healthy, but still very much alive. 

After a three month stay in the NICU, Atlas and I experienced one single night alone together in my apartment. I quickly realized I was in over my head. Given that my son’s father was based in Virginia for school, the bulk of the parental work sat on my shoulders. “Help” was a word that sat perched at the seat of my mouth almost daily - oftentimes not comfortably. My lease ended in June which was a month away, I began living with my parents & my son’s grandmother occasionally.

Atlas 6 months old — Beech Mountain, North Carolina (2023)

For those unfamiliar with my lore, I am a full-time photographer. My practice floats between editorial, commercial, and fine art. Prior to mothering, I went from place to place making photographs. Sleeping until two in the afternoon, my bedtime being four in the morning. I was 23 with very little discipline. It’s accurate to say by month three of my maternity leave I was going crazy with a fervent desperation for escape. Escape from the weight of caregiving, from being taken for granted, an escape from slowness, an escape from needing so much “help”.

Everyday felt the same, wake up (if I got any rest at all), feed the baby, change the baby, baby naps, uh oh he shitted up his back again, bath time, another bottle, nap, pump. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Days with no clear start and no clear finish. I’m not sure entirely what I thought being a parent would entail. In a perfect world, it would be something I would do alongside my son’s father, maybe even in a place of my own. But work was slow and money was almost nonexistent. My son’s NICU bills were nearly half a million dollars. I prayed daily that my lawyer could make those costs disappear (which he did, shout out to Bill!)

In the midst of all this turmoil I remember one night in particular was especially bad, my son would not sleep. He was a little over 5 months old when I developed a breast-feeding aversion. Night-feedings felt like nursing a puppy, the pulling and prodding at raw skin. I remember his small mouth latching onto my breast. I was sleepy to the point of delusion. I looked down at him and my son’s round face made puffy by prescribed diuretics, morphed into that of an old man. I truly hollered, which in turn, made him scream back at me! My mother came into my room to check on us randomly in the middle of the night. I told her in hysterics “I don’t know if I can I do this.” My mom picked up Atlas & high tailed it out of there.

In not caring for myself properly, prenatal vitamins had taken a backseat. I depleted myself of proper nutrition - my breast feeding aversion was essentially a bodily preservation tactic. Grief had become a squatter in my body. Grieving what my life used to be, how living used to feel. Grieving how the relationship with my son's father had become unrecognizable, the distance between us growing more cavernous by the day. When I thought about the life I wanted Atlas to have, that I wanted myself to have — this was simply not it.

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That following morning I drove to Target. This trip definitely should have been one to “the lady (aka: a therapist)”, but I was just grateful to have time to myself. I told no one how sad I had become, and I especially told no one how I saw my son’s face change that night. I should have, but instead I purchased a fucking Kindle. In some ways I believe reading saved me, or at least served as a grounding exercise for the time being. The books I read served as a distraction for how often I thought about death. I even day-dreamed of it at times. Perhaps I did not even long for the permanence of dying, just a deep sleep - a sleep so long that when I finally found myself awake, I’d be in another stage of my life, one where I had my shit together. 

I reflect on the first two years of my son’s life and I don’t think I would have been able to make strides as a mother or an overall human without the support of my friends and family. These days I use reading less as escapism and more for pleasure. 

While my postpartum hormones have leveled out, sadness still rears its head more often than I’d like. But I’ve made plans to do something about it, revisiting talk therapy but also taking the time to shift my perspective to one of gratitude. Countering every negative thought with a positive one. “You live with your parents” — “My son & I have a roof over our heads and my parents love having us here.” “Work is slow, what is wrong with me?” — “I am doing the work I love and living in my purpose.” “Being a mother is hard.” — “My son is quickly growing, he desperately wants to be seen and to communicate with me. He is beautiful and necessary. My job as a mother is beautiful and necessary.” “Life is hard.” -- “But it is also devastatingly gorgeous.”

The journey I am on is a big one, it has resulted in a great deal of transitions in my life. I am slowly coming to realize that my grief has been made by design and it is necessary for my growth. This realization has been difficult to sit with, but it is something I can most certainly do. So once you finish reading this letter, if I happen to cross any of your minds, please stop what you are doing at once and in your quietest voice, whisper godspeed.

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Reading: a form of time travel, teleportation, a vessel for understanding, and a means for escape.

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top 5 reads of 2022/2023:

To close out this letter I wanted to make a list of my favorite books that I read during the beginning of my maternal journey. These aren’t ranked in a particular order. They are books that have stayed at the forefront of my mind.  

1. Sula: Toni Morrison 

This book with a fucking experience. I am hyperlinking my twitter reaction thread here. Enjoy. 

I put off reading Sula for a while because I knew it’d be a canon event. I view the relationship I have with my friends as almost pseudo-romantic. I am in love with each of my friends for different reasons. Sula in some ways affirmed my affinity for platonic romance. The ending I found so heartbreaking. I’ll circle back & do a separate entry on this book at a later date. 

All that to say - it’s a goal of mine to read all of Toni Morrison’s books over the next two years. Sula was the perfect entry point. I will also say that by the time I finished Sula I mentally could not bring myself to read the foolishness I would typically skim as a palette cleanser. 

Final Sentence: It was a fine cry loud and long but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

2. The Vanishing Half: Britt Bennett

**Toni Morrison peers down from heaven, just as Brit Bennett cracks her knuckles after sending her first draft off to her editor. Toni whispers to Jesus “the kids are alright.” **

I compare Morrison and Bennett as their writings have similarities. Sula & TVH both feel like stories you’re not supposed to be hearing but you’re just catching wind of. Perhaps you were an outsider in this neighborhood, or maybe you were too young to be in grown folks’ business. But finally, you are grown enough, and allowed to hear the most satisfying gossip ever, and at the conversations end you are so fulfilled.

Final Sentence: They floated under the leafy canopy of trees, begging to forget.

3. Lone Women: Victor LaValle

My paternal grandfather is such a big fan of Westerns, 2023 was the year I understood why. My entry point to Westerns was the author Beverley Jenkins of course & her series of western based novels titled Old West Series. These are on the romantic side. Eventually I played Oregon Trail on my switch, my team died from dysentery so many fucking times. After that I set my sites on YellowStone. (I'm gonna have an entry for YellowStone later down the line.) But when Lone Women came across my table — aka Good Reads — I knew I was in for a treat & that I was.

(Brief Synopsis)

Following the death of her family Adeliade Henry flees to Montana with nothing but a small bit of money, the clothes on her back & a trunk holding a secret. 

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The pacing of the book - fabulous! The mystery of what’s in the trunk - fabulous! The lore surrounding Black life in the west - fabulous! Shout out to manifest destiny y’all, the only good thing that came of it is this book.

Final Sentence: The past is complicated.

4. Down the Drain: Julia Fox

This memoir is the Iliad but for teenage dirtbags. I say this as a compliment. It was a fucking journey.

The writing was so much better than I anticipated. Granted, my entry point to Julia Fox lore was the film Uncut Gems, and like most celebrity memoirs I was expecting something ghost-written and lacking depth. I got to the final page and said “Julia Fox, get behind me”. Upon completion I felt like her friend. She does such a lovely job at contextualizing her own life. 

In an interview she says “I’ve died so many times.” Which she has. It reminded me of the blues musician Little Freddie King - an icon from the Mississippi Delta, who nearly died several times. Once at the hands of a love scorned wife, the second time a shooting at a festival, the third from an ulcer due to alcoholism, and a fourth during hurricane Katrina. He stated in an interview “I’ve been dead so many times.” 

I guess I have been interested in mortality these days, but at the same time also life. The art of living, the performance of living. To Julia, life is performance, and the role of a lifetime is you. The role of a lifetime is living. Sometimes you gotta burn your life down to see the bones of it. Some might consider this train of thought a little trivial, maybe even chaotic, but I think that it was just what I needed to hear.

Final Sentence: But now everyone is wearing latex. // (Leaves a bit to be desired imo.)

5. In The Dream House: Carmen Maria Machado

I’d describe this memoir as a haunting essayistic exploration of an abusive relationship the author found herself inside of. An odd book, told in no particular format, utilizing various tropes in each coming chapter/essay to contextualize the abuse that took place — “The Dream House as Erotica” & “The Dream House as Omen”. In The Dream House reminded me of a relationship I found myself in around 2018 & 2019, but I appreciated how I did not find it triggering, if anything by the end it was healing. Machado does a lovely job of holding space for the beauty of lesbian relationships, but also interrogating the lack of canon there is around the abuse that can occur in them as well.

Final Sentence: My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it to you.

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If you read this whole thing, I’m letting you know now you’re God’s favorite.

Cheers xxxx

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