The Kind of Tired That Changes You
Thereâs a version of exhaustion people expect after having a baby, the kind everyone jokes about like itâs a rite of passage. This was something else entirely. This was the kind of tired that doesnât just sit in your body, it starts messing with how your brain processes the world.
When Evie came home, I didnât sleep for three days. Not a nap, not even that half-aware drifting people try to count as rest. I was fully awake the entire time, running on instinct, adrenaline, and whatever keeps a new mom functioning when she has no business still standing.
Somewhere in those first days, something in my brain shifted.
Blinking Between Worlds
It started with blinking.
Iâd be sitting in my mom and stepdadâs living room, holding my brand new baby, trying to exist in that raw postpartum hazeâand Iâd blink, and suddenly it looked like something out of The Walking Dead.
Same room. Same TV glowing in front of me. Same couch off to my right.
But the walls looked wrong.
The paint looked cracked and water-stained, like the house had been abandoned for years and left to rot quietly in place. The corners looked dark and damp. Parts of the ceiling felt like they shouldâve been sagging in. Even the window light looked cold, like daylight after the end of the world.
Nothing was actually destroyed, but everything looked exhausted. Worn thin. Like the house had absorbed too much life, too much grief, too much survival.
It felt less like a home and more like the shell of one.
Like I had blinked into a version of reality where whatever made the place feel warm and alive had already disappearedâŚand this was simply what remained after.
Then Iâd blink again, and everything would be completely normal. Clean. Safe. Exactly how it should be.
But my brain didnât reset as quickly as my eyes did.
When It Followed Me Outside
I thought it was just the house.
Then it happened in the car.
Iâd blink, and the world carried that same The Walking Dead energy. The road looked like it hadnât been maintained in years. The trees felt overgrown in a way that didnât feel peaceful, just unchecked. Everything still existed, but it felt like no one was really taking care of anything anymore.
Like people had stopped showing up for the world.
Then Iâd blink again, and everything would snap back into place. Cars moving. Roads intact. Life continuing like nothing had ever been wrong.
But my body held onto it. My chest would tighten, my awareness would spike, like I had just seen something I wasnât supposed to.
When Sound Started Slipping Too
It wasnât just visual.
My hearing would distort in ways that are hard to explain unless youâve felt it. Sounds would feel slightly delayed or too sharp, like everything was just a fraction out of sync. Sometimes it felt like the world had been turned down and pushed farther away. Other times it felt like everything was too close, too loud, too immediate.
It made everything feel unstable.
Because once more than one sense stops lining up, you stop trusting your environment. And when you stop trusting your environment, you start questioning yourself.
The Psychological Side of It
For a long time, I thought I had just broken something in my brain from exhaustion.
At the time, I told myself it was sleep deprivation because that felt like something I could handle. Three days without sleep, postpartum hormones, physical recovery, a newborn depending on me every secondâit made sense that my brain might glitch under that kind of pressure.
Looking back, thereâs actual psychology behind what I experienced.
Severe sleep deprivation can cause perceptual disturbances, especially visual ones. Your brain starts misprocessing input when it doesnât get the reset it needs, and those misfires can show up in quick flashes, almost like your mind is filling in gaps incorrectly (Waters et al., 2018).
Postpartum hormone shifts can also impact how your brain regulates reality. Thereâs something called derealization, where the world feels distant, altered, or slightly unreal, even though you logically know it isnât. It doesnât always look like panic or sadness. Sometimes it looks like standing in your own life and feeling like something is justâŚoff (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
Add in the mental load of new motherhoodâthe constant vigilance, the pressure of keeping a baby alive, the lack of control, the identity shiftâand your brain is operating under a level of stress it has never experienced before. In some cases, postpartum changes can include brief perceptual disturbances or dissociative symptoms, especially when combined with sleep deprivation and stress (Sit et al., 2006).
Sometimes it adapts.
Sometimes it slips.
Three Months of Quietly Questioning Reality
What makes this harder to talk about is that it didnât happen constantly.
It came and went for about three months.
Just enough to notice. Just enough to question. Just enough to make me aware that something wasnât quite right.
That in-between space is its own kind of trap. If something is constant, you deal with it. If something is extreme, you ask for help. But when something is occasional and hard to explain, itâs easier to downplay it than try to describe it out loud.
So I didnât.
I took care of my baby. I moved through my days. I functioned.
And in the background, there was always this quiet awareness that sometimes my brain would show me a different version of the world without warning.
What No One Really Talks About
People talk about postpartum depression. They talk about anxiety. They talk about the baby blues.
They donât talk enough about the moments where your perception shifts.
The moments where reality flickers just enough to make you question it. Where your senses donât fully line up. Where you feel present and functional, but something underneath it all doesnât feel stable.
Those experiences donât look dramatic from the outside. Thereâs no clear breakdown, no obvious signal that something is wrong.
But internally, they can be deeply unsettling.
Looking Back at That Version of Me
I donât have a perfect explanation for what I experienced, and I donât need one to know it mattered.
I lived it.
If I could sit next to that version of myself, in that living room, holding my newborn and blinking into a world that felt like it had already ended, I wouldnât tell her to push through it or minimize it.
Iâd tell her that it counts.
That even the quiet, hard-to-explain experiences deserve to be taken seriously. That just because something doesnât fit neatly into a diagnosis doesnât mean it isnât real.
Because motherhood doesnât just change your life.
Sometimes, it changes the way your brain lets you experience reality.
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