Ashley: I am very excited today. I have Caitlin billings joining me. C: Yeah. And to me, what that means is I explored what it meant to kind of grow up in a life that many people will be able to associate with and what that was like as I grew up with depression experiences, with some traumatic experiences and then coming into my own in my late twenties, thirties, building a family, thinking that everything was pretty well under order.
I got this, I got a career, I got a partner, I got two kids and then my kids started to grow up and I was dealing with my bipolar diagnosis at that time, taking a lot of different medications, struggling with depression and things had really gotten under control. My daughter, my eldest turned 12 and she began exhibiting a lot of the symptoms that I saw in myself growing up.
I had to reckon with that as a mother, as a parent, as an adult, seeing this, happen in my child while simultaneously dealing with it in myself. Can you take us back to when you started first exhibiting these symptoms and what that was like for you and maybe what that looked like? I think I really started noticing symptoms in my mid to late teens. I started having bouts of depression. I actually remember my mom taking me to see the doctor.
And this was like in the early nineties. That was the intervention I got for my depression. A: Even if you were a sports person, you could have the exact same depression that it was really challenging back then of what conversations look like to what conversations look like now.
C: Yes, absolutely. I also had a really complicated growing up. I was adopted by my father. So I grew up knowing that I was adopted but that stirred up a lot of feelings about my identity and who I was.
