120. I Didn't Lose Myself in Motherhood. I Never Found Myself Before It with Libby Ward. April roundtable with Erin Holland.

About this episode

Libby Ward discusses her journey through motherhood, mental health challenges, and self-discovery in a candid conversation.

Libby Ward built one of the internet’s most recognizable platforms for honest motherhood, and she did it by saying the things most moms were too afraid to say out loud. Now she’s put it all in a book: Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself, published by Crown. In this co-hosted episode, Ashley and Erin sit down with Libby to trace the full arc, from the small town church community where motherhood was put on a pedestal, to the postpartum rage that finally broke her open, to the sociology class that reframed everything, to going viral on TikTok during a pandemic, to writing a book for Crown that she nearly wrote as someone else entirely. It’s a conversation about what happens when women stop doing everything for everyone else and start asking who they actually are, and why that question so often doesn’t get asked until something breaks. In This Episode Who Libby was before TikTok- a 26-year-old in a conservative church community trying to be every kind of mom at once How her second child’s higher needs broke the plate-spinning and sent her to therapy for the first time Why her postpartum depression showed up as rage, not sadness and why that made it harder to recognize…

People in this episode

Hosts: Dr. Ashley Blackington, Erin Holland

Guest: Libby Ward

Topics covered

• motherhood
• mental health
• postpartum depression
• feminism
• self-discovery

Keywords

• motherhood
• postpartum rage
• therapy
• TikTok
• self-identity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Crown

Books & works: Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself

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