A note before you read: this piece discusses depression and intrusive thoughts during pregnancy, and the anticipation of postpartum depression.
Katie Austin knew before the test did. She woke up on the first morning of the year, turned to her husband, and said, "Happy New Year. I think I'm pregnant." Her whole body felt different — a certainty she couldn't explain. They took a test two days later, mostly, she admits, to calm her nerves. It only confirmed what she already knew.
She was right. She was also terrified.
"Even if you think you're ready, you're never really ready," she says. For a woman whose entire life has been built on preparation — the workouts, the discipline, the training plans laid weeks ahead — this was the thing she couldn't prepare for. "I was very, very, very excited and happy," she says. "But the scared part of it is very real."
Austin has spent her life in motion. She played Division I lacrosse at USC. She built a wellness brand — an app, workout programs, a following of more than a million. Fitness wasn't a career she chose so much as the air she breathed growing up. So when pregnancy arrived and quietly took the body she trusted offline, it didn't feel like a symptom. It felt like losing herself.
The Part That Comes Before the Announcement
The first trimester was the hardest thing. Austin doesn't soften this.
"I had a chemical imbalance in my brain. I was really depressed," she says. "I didn't want to work. I didn't want to do anything that I love. I couldn't eat the food that I loved. I could barely move my body. And I didn't feel like myself." For Austin, being unable to do either was its own kind of grief. And Austin was carrying it alone: it was still early, before the announcement, before anyone knew. "I felt very alone," she says, "because no one really knew I was pregnant."
There's a strange, unreal quality to those early weeks that almost no one describes, but she found the words. At seven or eight weeks — sick, exhausted, with nothing yet to show — she remembers thinking: Am I cosplaying this whole thing? Pregnant, but with no proof, no bump, no announcement. It didn't feel real yet. It just felt hard.
Am I cosplaying this whole thing?
That gap is exactly why she decided to talk about it. "By the time people post that they're pregnant, they're usually already 12 or 13 weeks along," she says. "They're already past the really hard part." The internet's version of early pregnancy skips the worst of it — the morning sickness gets a mention, the joy gets the caption, and the darkness gets edited out.
Austin wanted to leave the darkness in.
"Depression during pregnancy is a real thing," she says, more than once, deliberately. "If it happens to anyone else, you're not alone, and it's temporary," she offers. "I wish someone had told me a million times over that this happens, and that it's okay."
The Identity You Mourn
Austin says that the hardest part wasn't actually physical. "The identity shift, and the identity crisis that comes with it. You're kind of mourning your past life, because you know how much a baby is going to change your life. You're so excited for this new chapter, but you're also mourning your past self — and knowing nothing will ever really be the same."
You're also mourning your past self.
This is the center of it for her, and it's more complicated than simple loss. Because the past self she's mourning was, by her own account, a hard one to live with. "I realized how hard I was on myself before I got pregnant. I worked out very strictly, five days a week. I was always trying to work harder, harder, harder." Austin says that, from an early age, being an individual athlete taught her that the answer to everything was more effort, more discipline, more push.
Pregnancy took the push away. Around week 14 or 15, she had to redefine what a good workout even was. Before, that meant 45 minutes and a hard sweat. Now, some mornings, a good workout is a little stretching, a little movement, a walk around the block. Again and again, she has had to learn to call that enough. It doesn't always come easily. "I worked out this morning and thought, why can't I do jumping jacks? Why am I so out of breath?" she says. "I still want to push myself, because my energy is there. But I can't, and I shouldn't." The athlete's instinct hasn't disappeared. Austin is just learning not to obey it.
"This took me a while to navigate," she says. "And it still gets to me."
I still want to push myself. But I can't, and I shouldn't.
The Wonder, and the Wildness
Not all of it is heavy. Some of it is genuinely strange and wonderful — the baby's kicks, which started as "little tiny taps" and, at a certain point, became her daughter's whole body shifting inside her own. "It's a little bit spooky at the same time," Austin says. "Knowing how close you are to your baby, that you're the one carrying her — it's such a crazy feeling."
And some of it is just wild. She is candid about the intrusive thoughts that arrived the moment she got pregnant — the strange, unbidden fears that made ordinary things, like getting in a car to drive, suddenly frightening. She doesn't dramatize them or spell them out. She just names them, plainly, as one more thing no one warns you about, one more way the mind does one thing, and the body does another.
It all belongs to the same story: a woman who is used to being in charge of her body and her mind, learning that pregnancy puts both, for a while, outside her control.
What Even the Best Preparation Can't Do
If anyone should have been ready for this, it was Austin. She grew up on set with her mother, the fitness icon Denise Austin, starting at six weeks old. Wellness wasn't in her upbringing; it was her upbringing.
And it still wasn't enough.
"My mom always instilled in me how important it is to take care of your body and keep moving while you're pregnant," she says. "But every single pregnancy is so different." Her mother had easy pregnancies; Austin isn't sure her mother ever knew the depression that met her in the first trimester. "Someone can tell you all of these things," she says, "but you really have to learn them for yourself. That's the hard part about it, but it's also the beautiful part, because you're going through it, your body is changing, and you're really in charge of everything."
It's a striking thing for her to land on: in charge of everything. After all the loss of control — the body that won't cooperate, the mind that won't settle — Austin arrives at a different definition of control entirely. Not command over what her body can do, but authorship of the experience itself. She isn't performing this. She's living it. It is, in its way, a working definition of matrescence: not the loss of a self, but the slow assembling of another one.
Beyond the Nursery
With the due date close, Austin is doing less of what you might expect and more of what you might not. The nursery, the outfits, the hospital-bag aesthetics — she's excited for all of it, but she's clear that it isn't the point.
"I'm trying to educate myself on what actually matters, beyond the nursery and beyond the aesthetic," she says. "I think we need to focus more on our mindset." Austin makes her living, in part, on the beautiful image. Choosing to look past it is a discipline in itself.
Having lived through depression in her first trimester, she's bracing — realistically, and without dread — for the possibility that it returns after birth. "If I experience postpartum depression, I want to be prepared for it," she says. "I don't want to have expectations that I'm going to bounce back right away."
Sit with that sentence for a second. This is a woman built to push through and power forward — and she's choosing not to. This might be the healthiest prescription she has to offer. "If you set your expectations realistically…I think that can really help." It is, more or less, what the fourth trimester asks of everyone who enters it.
The joys, meanwhile, keep arriving in small, unexpected forms. Aversions disappearing — coffee and pasta, suddenly welcome again — and the strange relief of it. "It makes you feel like yourself again," she says. And of course it does — feeling like herself is the thing she's been chasing this entire pregnancy, and it turns out it can come back one cup of Joe at a time. There's also the nesting with her husband, the newborn class, learning how to bathe and burp a baby — the quieter, forward-tilting joys of building the next version of her life instead of mourning the previous one.
In the end, this is what she wants other women to hear. She doesn't reach for anything triumphant. She reaches for grace.
"No matter how prepared you think you are, you're going to learn so much in real time," she says. "Your body is changing every day, and what feels good is going to change every day, too. It's okay to slow down. It's okay to redefine what success or a good workout looks like. It's okay to ask for help. And it's okay if this experience doesn't look exactly like what you expected."
That last one is the permission she most wishes someone had handed her.
"That's something I wish more women heard before going through it themselves."
If you're struggling during pregnancy or postpartum, you're not alone. Postpartum Support International offers free, confidential support: postpartum.net or 1-800-944-4773. In a crisis, call or text 988.
