(The picture I’m describing can be found here. The user disabled downloads of her work so I’m not able to share it with you on my blog post.)

Purple flowers hang upside down, surrounded by sharp green blades of grass, but it’s not how they’re meant to be seen. It’s how the camera sees them, how the artist sees them. It’s all a translation of beauty, seen from a different angle.

There’s a quote beneath the photo, “Life takes your dreams and turns them upside down.”

I can’t think of a better description for Postpartum Mood & Anxiety disorders, can you?

For many of us, we painstakingly plan our pregnancies, buy the right things for the nursery and laugh and giggle at our baby showers. Others may not feel the same way but hope to feel better once baby arrives, banking on birth to improve their mood. Still others are just struggling to adjust to even being pregnant as it’s unplanned.

Whatever your situation, there are hopes and dreams you have attached to the outcome of your current journey. When those hopes and dreams are dashed against the rocks by the trauma of a PMAD, things get a lot darker. You feel turned upside down and inside out. As if there’s no escape from the hell in which you’ve found yourself.

But, even in that darkness, even when you least feel it, just as those purple flowers, you are still beautiful. Flowers begin as a seed, some as a horrific bulb which is then planted in the dark earth, covered with dirt, and forced to fight it’s way out into the sun. Once it emerges, you don’t see the dirt for long. It shrugs it off and speeds toward the sun, toward blooming into a gorgeous thing of beauty. Flowers require care, sunlight, water, nourishment. They need to be tended to in order to bring joy to the world. Think of how bland the world would be without the colourful variations of flowers springing forth in even the most difficult of places.

You are not destined to spend eternity in that dark place. One day, you too, will burst forth, speed toward the sun, and bloom into a gorgeous blossom.

(This post written as part of WEGO Health’s Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge. You can check it out and join here: http://t.co/kp15ymv1)