Dream Notes

from Meg Bartlett
May 25, 2026

Did you miss me the last two weeks? My body apparently wanted to spend Mother's Day morning in the emergency room which was followed four days later by another crisis... and then I got my son's cold because he started daycare.

Rest assured, I'm ok and have been on the mend but I want to talk about my experience because when I was in the thick of it I really needed someone who knew what I was experiencing.

Please note that this is not a typical Dream Notes newsletter but we'll return to our regular scheduled programming next week.

In this week's Dream Notes:

• A personal health update.
• How I know I've healed even though shit still hit the fan.
• And how I'm updating my Construct (the terms and conditions of my soul's human experience).

Let's roll...

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First, I'm Ok. But...

Bruh.

There's nothing like spending your first mother's day in the emergency room.

If you've read my book then you know about the medical episode I had in 2020 where my husband found me passed out, butt-ass naked, on the bathroom floor at 3am in extreme pain.

It was a whole thing where I went to the hospital in my first ambulance ride and suffered for upwards of 10 hours through unrelenting abdominal distress.

They tried every pain killer, including morphine, but I somehow was unreceptive and then proceeded to panic on morphine while throwing up and trying not to black out over and over again. I got an abdominal ultrasound, vaginal ultrasound, CT scan, bloodwork... you name it, they tested it.

Unfortunately, I came away from that experience in 2020 with no findings or results, just a collective shrug after it died down on its own and the suggestion to, "come back if it happens again."

Great. Glad modern science is so advanced.

Well... this last Mother's Day I experienced that again except this time Brandon found me passed out halfway into the bathtub, bent over the side like a limp pretzel.

The extra scary part was that this time it took him almost 2 minutes to wake me up.

So, once again, we called an ambulance, got my in-laws to come over to watch the baby just after midnight, and I was carted off to the emergency room for fluids and a litany of tests.

Then we waited.

But this time they found something!

I may potentially have an IBD (irritable bowel disease).

It doesn't show up often because I eat pretty well, take care of my body, and have made many supportive changes over the years to alleviate stress... but then I became a mom, got diagnosed with postpartum OCD and ate two fried chicken sandwiches on back-to-back days.

I'm crushed I'll never be able to really enjoy a good fried chicken sandwich again. 😭

While that sounds shitty (pun intended), I'm honestly glad to have a direction to look into. I've been experiencing this type of pain at least a couple of times a year to varying degrees since I was 14 years old and while I've only passed out from the pain a handful of times... that's still too many times to pass out from pain!

I'm so happy to have a direction to explore because if I can make the right lifestyle changes then I may never have to feel that pain again.

WHOA.

Life changing.

So that was Sunday, May 10th but the crazy week didn't stop there...

As I spent the next few days recovering I got a head cold from my son who started daycare the week prior AND my first period postpartum.

(Also why does no one tell you about the first postpartum period?! It was the most intense period of my life. I was honestly concerned of hemorrhaging. WTF.)

The next day, my hormones plummeted and I found myself face to face with a deep, very serious mental health crisis. I have since been diagnosed with PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder), an extreme form of PMS that, for me, apparently now leads to crisis.

Pregnancy really did change a lot of things for me.

Personally, I have a history of major depressive disorder and even though I've been living life depression-free for about 5 years now, my husband and I knew the likelihood of postpartum depression was higher for me.

We planned for it.

What we didn't plan for was how sudden and intense it could be.

And, because it's not talked about nearly enough, I'm going to talk about it here. Please know that I'm ok, my family is ok, and we're set up for success moving forward.

If you don't have capacity right now for an intense dive into the mind of a severely depressed individual you can skip ahead to the section which discusses how I know I've healed over the last 10 years despite having this experience.

A Snapshot of Major Depression

Back in 2017, I came within a moment of taking my own life.

My dog at the time, Roody-Roo, saved my life by literally vomiting at my feet right before I was about to leave the planet. He snapped me out of the moment and I was filled with horror at the thought that he would have been mentally scarred forever. I bent down, put aside the darkest of moments, and cared for him.

Since then, I have made many life changes, healed a lot of stuff through various forms of therapy, built a robust mental health toolbox, and completely transformed my life for the better.

I've been healed and thriving for over five years!

So, when I lay in the chair rocking my son at 4am in the morning crying silently but uncontrollably, feeling myself sinking into an all-too-familiar oblivion, I knew something was very, very wrong.

This was familiar but different than the psychological depression I knew.

I could feel it.

Whatever it was, it wasn't me this time.

Something was happening in my brain's chemistry but I was powerless to stop it.

I deployed every single technique in my mental toolbox.

I engaged the roaring fire of my willpower.

I clung to my son like a life raft, but the storm dragged me down anyways.

It wasn't enough.

The waves crashed overhead and I drowned.

The thoughts came roaring in.

I want to die.

I shouldn't be alive.

My husband and son would be better off without me.

These thoughts were not mine but they came from within me.

I have struggled to communicate just what that feels like. When part of you says something so crazy you know it's not true but it takes over your body anyways.

Why was my brain doing this to me?

Over and over again for hours I thought about how I should end my life. I thought about how my husband would grieve for a bit but then he'd find someone else, a better wife and a better mom, and he'd be happy with her and I'd be happy for him. I thought about how my son was so young and wouldn't even remember this, he'd only miss the concept of me.

Then it somehow got worse when I thought, I'm terrified of my son.

I'm scared to be left alone with him.

I'm scared I won't be able to care for him and in my ineptitude he'll die because I am not enough.

I am responsible for literally shaping the foundation of this human being's life, of this soul's experience on Earth, and if I fuck it up then it's all my fault and I will never forgive myself.

I felt completely inadequate to be my son's mother, to be my husband's wife, and to be a human being at all.

I was completely overwhelmed.

The weight of crushing responsibility was too much.

I silently cried in the chair holding my son, terrified, for hours as he slept.

Then my husband woke up for work and to take Lyron to daycare. He could see that something wasn't ok and asked me about it.

I knew that if I wanted it to stop I needed to tell him what was going on.

I needed to ask for help.

The part they don't tell you about depression is that the hardest thing to do is to ask for help.

In the moments when you think you don't deserve to be here, asking for help is antithetical.

It took every ounce of my willpower, sheer willpower, to tell him what was going on.

Of course, it scared him. He had never seen me like this before.

He'd seen some dark things but this darkest of pits I thought I'd left behind in Seattle before I even knew my husband existed almost 10 years ago.

But Brandon was there for me now. I wasn't alone.

He listened and talked to me. He left briefly to take our son to daycare and then took the rest of his day off work to be with me.

I reached out to my sister-in-law, another mom, and asked her how serious this was. She advised me to either go to the ER or reach out for help from my GP.

It was serious.

After wrestling with the depression for several more hours I pushed through the darkness and reached out to my doctor. She also advised me to go to the ER but I thought that was just going to make it worse and refused. She understood and got me some resources and a temporary prescription for something to help me through the moment.

Eventually the moment passed and the thoughts began to subside.

I was still feeling the weight of the depression and was afraid to be left alone with my son but I was beginning to recover.

The next day I had an appointment with my GP and was diagnosed with PMDD, a severe, chronic form of PMS.

We also decided to start me on an SSRI.

I felt completely defeated.

I had done so much work, so much healing... for what?

So I can walk away with a prescription because I'm not enough to fix my own brain?

Because I need help?

And then I understood: this is what healing can look like.

I have healed.

I have literally done everything I can to better my life.

I was able to ask for help in the darkest of moments on-the-spot instead of letting it stew and consume me.

I engaged my willpower and acted because I knew I wanted to live.

And I accepted the help that was given to me.

I have learned that I don't have to do this all on my own and that asking for help isn't a weakness, it can be literally life saving.

Seeing Healing Even in Crisis

Going back to Mother's Day, I saw healing in the moment I came-to, draped over the edge of the bathtub.

My husband asked me a series of questions to make sure I hadn't hit my head and then I said, "call your mom and ask her to come watch the baby. Then call 911."

Back in 2020 when this last happened I was still in a state of mind where I didn't want to burden anyone with my needs and I had the audacity during that experience to refused medical care at first.

Doesn't that sounds insane?

In 2020, after passing out from pain, writhing on the bathroom floor, I had the gall to tell my husband I'd just suffer through it.

WTF.

He convinced me otherwise and I received care, but I still felt guilty about needing care back then.

Girl. Wut?

This time, I could see that my self-compassion had healed. I understood what I needed and knew that (obviously) I wasn't a burden for needing emergency care in an emergency.

Through all of the ups and downs last week we asked my in-laws for help with the baby when I needed to recover and they were there for us.

Again, I asked for help.

And finally, when I was in the midst of a deep mental crisis, I dug deep and pulled together the willpower to ask for help.

This is how I know I've healed.

Healing doesn't mean that shitty situations just don't happen anymore, it means that you answer those situations with the self-compassion and understanding you always deserved.

Is it a simple coincidence that this all started on my first Mother's Day?

Definitely not. I have a lot of issues that stem from "the before times" and in this next chapter of my life I NEED to let go of the things that no longer serve me so that I can become the mom both me and my son deserve.

That's a synchronicity if I ever saw one!

A synchronicity declaring that my wounds are still healing but that I'm ready to move forward and update my Construct, the terms and conditions of the human experience.

The Construct

Some time ago I had this very, very intense experience with an extradimensional being who explained the concept of The Construct to me. (I promise I'm working on writing more about that).

The Construct is the terms and conditions of your human experience.

As I understand it, before we enter our physical bodies as infants, our souls like to pick some main goals, hash out some fated interactions with others, and basically design our human experience as much as we're able (free will and the decisions of others can still influence the end result).

But this life plan doesn't just happen on it's own, we agree to don a version of The Construct to help us live it—the software our brains and bodies run on that shapes our perception of existence.

This software (The Construct) is a series of limitations we agree to take onto ourselves during the first part of our lives, mostly with the goal of learning how to accept, move through, or overcome the limitations.

These limitations can be anything from your financial class to your culture, religion, mental health diagnoses, traumas, passed-down medical conditions, etc.

My Construct includes an extensive family history of trauma, major depression (it's literally in my DNA), and something I just recently learned about called "low vagel tone."

Vagel tone is the state of one's vagus nerve. The vagus nerve runs from your brain all the way down to the bottom of your spine and it touches every single organ in your body including your GI system.

When your vagel tone is low, it means you're stressed out to the point of living most of your existence in fight or flight mode. High vagel tone means you exist in the calm, rest-and-digest mode.

Low vagel tone can affect everything from mental health to... your gut.

Do you see how this is all starting to make sense for me?

From severe abdominal pain to mental health crisis my vagus nerve is in critical need of chilling the fuck out.

Thankfully, my GP got me in touch with a wonderful woman who talked to me all about vagel tone and how I can begin to strengthen it.

A lot of the exercises are already a part of my mental health toolbox like deep breathing, cold exposure, and probiotics (the gut really is the second brain!), but I had only been implementing these tools when I needed them—when my vagus nerve was already stressed.

The key to help yourself get back to a high vagel tone is to implement your toolbox and exercises 3-6 times per day regardless of how you feel.

That's the part I was missing!

While some people, like my husband, just exist with good vagel tone, people like me have to work a little harder to maintain it. That's just a fact of my life. It's not my fault and it doesn't mean I haven't tried hard enough... I literally do not have the software to run the "cool, calm, and collected" version of the Earth experience.

But I have the ability to upgrade my software.

So the next leg of my healing journey begins, and this time it includes adjusting my Construct.

It's time to update the software my body and brain are running on.

To do this I need to enter a period of adjustment between two worlds: the old world and the new world. (Anyone else thinking of all that talk of 5th dimensional shift out there? This is apparently my version of that.)

Equipped with more knowledge I'll be able to re-implement exercises to calm my nervous system and strengthen my vagel tone. The SSRI will help adjust the chemical structure of my brain for the time being. And I'll be working with a new form of therapy specific to my postpartum OCD needs.

Essentially, I'll be seeking out the bugs in my software and replacing them with new, supportive code.

I have no idea what the future holds, how this will all work out, or how long it might take but I do know that I have finally learned how to ask for help and I'm so, so very glad that I did.

Because of that lesson, I have literally begun to re-write my soul's terms and conditions for the human experience.

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So, that's a lot to take in. If you're still reading this far, I thank you for witnessing my experience and I hope you found some of this helpful or at least insightful.

Due to these circumstances, I'll be more fluid with my emails. Sometimes they might be every week, sometimes they might not come in for a while.

I ask for your understanding and flexibility because, regardless of when my letters arrive, you know I'll always have something interesting to say.

Many blessings!

Meg 🐝

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