When Meaning Falls Away: Understanding Fallback, Love, and the Demands of Becoming
What postpartum depression taught me about the collapse of adult meaning-making, the necessity of love as a developmental force, and how we return to ourselves through relationship.
Introduction: When the self goes quiet
Becoming a parent reorganized me.
Not in the way books had suggested—not through gentle expansion or the acquisition of new skills—but through collapse. I fell apart. And as I unraveled, I began to notice just how fragile our sense of self can be when stretched across thresholds of responsibility, fatigue, and love. This wasn’t just personal. As someone who studies leadership and development, I recognized what was happening to me as something deeply instructive about how adults change. We often think of leadership as a forward-moving arc—clarity, capacity, direction. But growth doesn’t always look like progress. Sometimes, it looks like losing access to the very strengths we’ve built our identities on. Sometimes, it looks like crying in the dark while holding a child you love so much it breaks you.
I offer a reframing: matrescence is not only a physiological or emotional rite of passage. It is a developmental one—an initiation that demands we reckon with who we are, how we make meaning, and what sustains us in the dark.
In those early months of parenthood, I began to understand that becoming a leader—of a team, a movement, or a family—means being able to hold ourselves and others through moments when meaning falls apart. It means understanding what Dr. Valerie Livesay calls fallback: the temporary loss of access to our most complex ways of knowing. It also means recognizing the kind of care that allows us to return. bell hooks calls this care love, not in the romantic sense, but as a political and spiritual ethic—a practice that makes repair and return possible.
This piece is an attempt to thread together my lived experience with these two frameworks. I write from the threshold of matrescence, but the lessons here extend far beyond the nursery. They speak to the quiet ruptures that shape us all—and what it takes to come back changed.
There are times when the frameworks that once held us no longer work in a way that’s felt in the bones—where meaning evaporates mid-sentence, and the tools we've used to navigate the world no longer fit the shape of our experience. These moments often go unnamed in public life, dismissed as personal hardship or emotional overwhelm. But from a developmental lens, they matter. They mark the edges of our current complexity and the conditions under which growth—or retreat—emerges.
This is the terrain of Dr. Valerie Livesay’s Fallback Theory, which explores what happens when adults, faced with overwhelming stress or trauma, temporarily lose access to their most complex way of making meaning. Fallback is not regression. It is not a failure. It is an involuntary collapse—a narrowing of our interpretive bandwidth in response to disorganizing conditions. In parallel, bell hooks offers us the moral and communal conditions under which return becomes possible: love. Not the fleeting kind, but love as an ethic of care, commitment, and clarity.
In this piece, I explore the intersection of these two frameworks through the disorienting passage of postpartum depression—a time when I, as a new parent, found myself lost in the fog of physical depletion, emotional breakdown, and identity reorganization. Through this story, I offer a reframing: matrescence is not only a physiological or emotional rite of passage. It is a developmental one—an initiation that demands we reckon with who we are, how we make meaning, and what sustains us in the dark.
Part 1: Fallback is not failure
Dr. Valerie Livesay defines fallback as a temporary loss of access to our current way of knowing—a narrowing of perspective, not because we choose it, but because the system is under threat. In these moments, we don’t regress to who we once were, but we may find ourselves behaving or perceiving in ways that feel unfamiliar or incoherent to our usual self. What’s key, she says, is that fallback is not a deficiency—it’s a signal. It tells us that the conditions we’re navigating exceed the complexity we have available at that moment.
Fallback is commonly triggered by five factors: physiological depletion, accumulated stress, contextual gravitational pulls, identity rupture, and unresolved trauma. Postpartum introduced all five at once.
On the fifth day of my daughter’s life, she was admitted to the hospital for jaundice. The pediatrician explained that if we didn’t act quickly, she could suffer permanent brain damage. Just five days postpartum, my body felt like a ziplock bag—organs still suspended in fluid, rearranging themselves after labor. My muscles trembled with fatigue. My spirit, already tender from birth, began to splinter. A nurse told me, with clinical detachment, the condition stemmed from my inadequate milk supply. I was sleep-deprived, bleeding, discombobulated. And inside that swirl, I wasn’t just overwhelmed—I was unmade.
We were placed on a strict triple-feeding schedule: breastfeed, pump, bottle-feed—every 2 to 3 hours, around the clock. When one session ended, we had only 20 to 30 minutes before the next began. The schedule was relentless, designed to stimulate supply through demand. We added a supplemental nursing system, which required my partner to hold a bottle with a thin feeding tube that we inserted into our baby’s mouth as she latched onto my breast. It was a task that demanded intense coordination and precision—skills we did not have in our sleep-deprived state. Each session felt like an Olympic event with no training and no coach. My body, still raw, was conscripted into a punishing cycle.
I tried everything to increase supply: power pumping (which triggered a low-grade fever), heated massagers, lactation teas, hydration, oats in every form, dozens of herbal supplements. One breast responded. The other remained quiet. I joked, grimly, that I was nonbinary in that way too—one breast performing the expectation, the other refusing. Meanwhile, milk blebs—tiny nipple blisters—formed and burned like glass. To relieve them, I had to nurse through searing pain. Some parents pierce them with sterilized needles. I never did, but I understood the urge.
It was the most difficult experience of my life. Harder than immigrating alone at fifteen. Harder than divorce. Harder than my most disorienting spiritual awakenings. Because this time, my body wasn’t just a participant—it was the battlefield. And with a body in crisis, my mind lost its grip. I couldn’t access intuition. I couldn’t find perspective. I counted every ounce she drank. I cried when she latched. I cried when I cried. I remember whispering, quietly, shamefully: I don’t think I’m strong enough for this.
Looking back, I see the markers of fallback clearly. I had not lost my adult self. I just couldn’t reach them. I could remember what it felt like to trust, to decide, to know. But those faculties were out of reach. The scaffolding of meaning-making had crumbled. What remained was survival. The dissonance between my values and my behavior—between the parent I wanted to be and the one I was able to be—only deepened the shame.
Livesay emphasizes that fallback often reveals the fragility of even our most well-developed capacities. Under extreme stress, we may still articulate our values, but we cannot enact them. We may remember what care or perspective or self-trust feels like, but we cannot access it. That loss of access—not a loss of character—can be profoundly destabilizing for leaders and caregivers alike. It is humbling, in a profound way, to witness our interior architecture fail us—especially when we have built our identities on resilience, insight, and care.
Part 2: The slow return of complexity
Livesay’s theory also gestures toward what she calls spring forward—the possibility that, with the right conditions, we not only recover from fallback but reemerge with greater depth. That movement isn’t linear or guaranteed. It depends on reflection, relational holding, and environments that support integration rather than shame.
In my case, that return began not through strategy, but through softness. One evening, I was desperate for a nap. But the guilt screamed louder than the fatigue. What if the bottle made her reject my breast? What if skipping one feeding endangered her? My partner and mother-in-law told me: “Sleep. We’ve got her.” I let myself rest. A small act of surrender—but it changed everything.
Days later, I found myself crying on the phone with a milk donor introduced by my lactation consultant. She listened. Then said, “I’ve been there. I cried every day too. I didn’t produce enough at first. But now I have extra. I’ll bring it to you.” A stranger, with her five-month-old baby and mother-in-law in tow, drove thirty minutes to feed mine. I cried again, this time in awe. In her generosity, I felt the first flicker of return. That night, wrapped in my partner’s arms, something in me loosened. My thoughts dimmed. I still didn’t have answers. But I was no longer alone.
From a leadership perspective, this is instructive. Complexity doesn’t reemerge in isolation. Leaders, like all people, need conditions for coherence. We need space for reflection. We need communities that can hold contradiction without disintegration. If we want leaders who can metabolize difficulty, we need to stop expecting them to do it alone.
Postpartum taught me that spring forward isn’t marked by clarity—it begins in the smallest gestures of coherence. A single uninterrupted nap. A neighbor who drops off soup. A moment of laughter in the fog. These are not just comforts. They are conditions of recovery. They offer us back to ourselves.
It also taught me that while fallback is personal, it is rarely private. The story of my postpartum unraveling is my own, but the patterns—of disorientation, silence, repair—are shared across countless thresholds. Whether in birth, grief, failure, or political awakening, we all know what it is to fall apart. What matters is how we are held while we do.
Part 3: Love is a developmental force
bell hooks teaches us that healing is not solitary. “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” Her writings on love—as a willful act, a political practice, a spiritual commitment—mirror what fallback theory outlines: that development is relational. That repair is possible. That dignity must be affirmed in the very places where we feel most ashamed.
What helped me move through fallback was not a better lactation plan. It was being loved—tenderly, unconditionally—by people who didn’t need me to be okay in order to stay. People who didn’t rush me out of the fog, but who held lanterns quietly while I wandered.
hooks’ conception of love insists that love is not a feeling, but an action. Love is not what we say but how we show up. Love, in this sense, becomes a necessary condition for developmental repair. In my postpartum haze, it was the persistent, quiet presence of others—my partner’s arms, my mother-in-law’s care, a stranger’s milk—that created the soil for reentry.
hooks writes, “Love is as love does.” What she names is not just an emotional ethic—it is a developmental imperative. Without love, our capacity to spring forward is stunted. We return to perform, to mask, and to fall again. With love, we integrate. We grow—not back to who we were, but forward into someone new.
To lead in love is to understand that power can be generative, that vulnerability is not weakness, and that presence is a practice. Leaders who love—who commit to staying when it’s hard, who create conditions for others to return to themselves—are not soft. They are vital. And the same is true in our most intimate leadership roles: as parents, as partners, as neighbors.
Conclusion: When we fall back
If fallback is the descent, then love is the bridge. Not back to who we were, but forward—toward a more complex, compassionate, and courageous way of being.
My journey through postpartum wasn’t a detour from my leadership work—it was a profound embodiment of it. Becoming a parent taught me more about power, vulnerability, and relational repair than any theory or training. It illuminated what it means to lead from a place of rupture—not in spite of it. In the fog of exhaustion and doubt, I experienced firsthand what it means to lose access to one’s most evolved capacities. And in the slow return, I learned that what matters most isn’t how fast we bounce back, but who and what meets us in the space between.
Leadership is often imagined as a forward march: more mastery, more clarity, more control. But in practice, leadership demands that we relate to ambiguity, to loss, to rupture. Fallback reminds us that those moments are not detours—they’re part of the journey. And hooks reminds us that how we meet one another in those moments is what shapes who we become.
When meaning falls away, we are not failing. We are meeting the edge of our current structure of understanding. In that threshold, love is not just helpful—it is essential. Not the kind of love that rescues or fixes, but the kind that stays. The kind that sees. The kind that dares to walk beside us as we reenter the world changed.
If fallback is the descent, then love is the bridge. Not back to who we were, but forward—toward a more complex, compassionate, and courageous way of being.
And that is where leadership begins again—when we allow our broken-open moments to reshape not just how we lead, but how we understand the work of becoming. Parenthood has made me softer, slower, and strangely, more steady. I no longer see fallback as failure, but as sacred interruption—an invitation to deepen. And I now know, in my bones, that love isn’t extra. It’s infrastructure.