Matrescence brain fog and how I emerged (kind of) on the other side of it

In 1935, in an attempt to illustrate how absurd it was to represent quantum particles in a given finite state when they are in fact constantly moving, Edwin Schrödinger imagined a macroscopic thought experiment that places a cat in a box where it will eventually die of radioactive exposure. But we don’t know exactly when. So he postulated that until the box is opened, the hypothesis has to be : the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.

During my pregnancy, I was the box. My belly hosted Schrödinger’s cat. For 9 months, my body EMBODIED a host of possibilities : a new life or not, the old me or a new me, my old life or a totally different one. It felt like being on the edge of a cliff, oscillating between being my normal self and being a future mother, not even beginning to understand what that would entail. The closer we got to D-day, the less abstract these possibilities became. Little did I know how accurate this analogy was as going through matrescence did see me emerge a totally different person : the same way we model electrons in quantum physics, I went from being a spin up to a spin down and vice versa.

Matresence is the birth of a mother. It is the process a women goes through when she births a baby for the first time. It is physical, psychological and overall BRUTAL.

The pain, the scars, the fatigue, the weakness, though they feel like forever in the moment, given time, the weight of them lessens. Even the memory of the trauma fades. You heal and your body takes care of (nearly) everything. But the identity crisis, that is a whole other issue.

During the first few months I was underwater. Taking care of a newborn requires such a level of selflessness that disappearing into one self was a necessity. I wasn’t really aware of it – gotta love those survival mechanisms – when I wasn’t interacting with other people. That would be when I would realize I had NOTHING to say, nothing going on in my brain other than BABY. Having the simplest conversation was a challenge. My brain was a foggy moor with nothing of interest to latch on to for MILES. And the crazy thing is, for 6 months, I didn’t even care. 

But when Le Baby was around 7 months old, a routine was in place, breastfeeding was no longer HELL, my body no longer felt like an open wound and the tiniest bit of mental space became available and so that’s when I started asking myself : if I no longer have time or energy for the things I love, am I still me ? I felt like an empty shell, a ghost of my former life here to remind me I was someone before all this.

The question of how I was going to get back to myself became a growing concern but intuitively I knew that if I had even a few blissful parenthesis in flow state, it would most definitely help.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the human mind can process up to 110 bits of information per second but at any given moment of the day of just going through the motions, our conscious minds are generally taking in about 60 bits per second. When we are challenging ourselves with a task that happens to be something we enjoy doing and we’re good at, we achieve a flow mental state, allowing us to focus the full capacity of our mind on the job at hand. Our concentration is so intense that we forget about the world around us and ourselves. All that matters is the project in front of us – and it can leave us feeling ecstatic, motivated and fulfilled – (thank you dopamine !).

I’ve known how to reach this flow state for a very long time now. My first conscious flow state was preparing to sit for the math exam of the bac. I came to enjoy my practice time and I would slip effortlessly into flow state during every training session, not wanting it to end. Even today, the thing I’m proudest of is not the 19/20 I got at the exam but it’s the pleasure I got from the actual work and that huge ego boost of knowing in my bones that I COULD DO THIS. Nowadays, it’s all about arts and crafts for me. Materializing visuals that pop up in my brain is how I get there whether the visual is a drawing, a decorative setup in my home, upscaling a piece of furniture, a new sewing project. I get in the zone and there’s no pulling me out. Where I used to enjoy the thrill of getting the right answer for the sake of it now I have the added bonus of having made something that I pre-visualized in my mind and that I can keep on enjoying once I’m no longer in flow state.

So I consciously made the time to sit myself down at my desk and I waited for something, anything, to inspire me and start up the creative machine that is my brain. The aim at first not being to produce anything in particular but just to get that feeling back of knowing exactly what to do and how to achieve it, that familiar feeling I associated with my former self. And the great thing is that most human brains work the same way so it’s all about finding that thing that gets you there. 

And then it becomes about making the time… or having the life partner who helps keep the rest of the world- but mostly Le Baby- at bay while you deep dive in yourself and reconnect.