Leah Kim has been a long-time writer and champion of mental health, narrating her personal stories and essays so poignantly about her childhood trauma, growing up a daughter of a mentally unwell mother, and then battling postpartum depression (PPD), anxiety, panic disorder, and PTSD when she became a mother. We were so fortunate to sit down with Leah to dive deeper into her long-term experience with mental health in this episode.

Leah is a second-generation Korean American, born in Chicago and raised in the Bay Area. But she has traveled worldwide and may be better known for her admirable career as Nike's former Global Yoga Ambassador for 10 years. She is currently a mother of two, a blogger, and a podcast host herself for Voices on the Side. She is also a writer with a book in the works!

Because Leah grew up around her mother who was mentally unwell for as long as she could remember, she tried to set herself up to be as mentally well as possible before she became a mother. Leah thought that being a yoga and mindfulness expert meant that she would be able to think her way out of any darkness. She had a firm belief that she should be able to have a "natural" birth to fit her narrative as Nike's Yoga Ambassador. But 9 years ago, when her birth plan for her first child went south, she was not prepared for the traumatic aftermath.

In this episode, we talk about what she describes as "years long PPD after my first child," including how she first realized she actually needed more help when she started getting anxiety and panic attacks. These panic attacks didn't start until her son was 1.5 years old and finally led her to seek out therapy and help. We talk about how we cannot put a timeline on mental health and that PPD can go on longer than a year.

If you are someone who has had PPD for longer than a year or experienced panic disorder or C-PTSD, you may resonate deeply with this episode. But even if you have not, Leah touches on a lot of themes of mental health challenges that many new moms go through. Back when she had her first child, social media had not been such a safe space to talk openly about things like PPD, but Leah was one of the few AAPI voices on maternal mental health back then and continues to be now.

Please tune in and listen for yourself to Leah, who was the inspiration to Jasmine (one of our Healing the Tigress cohosts) for realizing how important having an AAPI voice in this space really was to her.

Resources mentioned:

This is Not What I Expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression by Karen Kleiman, MSW, LCSW

Find Leah at:

• IG: @leahsoojinkim

• Podcast: Voices on the Side
• Blog: https://www.on-motherhood.com/

Please share with a friend if you found this helpful, and we always welcome ratings and reviews to help us increase visibility for our AAPI community in the maternal mental health space. Thank you!

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