Olivia Munn recently made refreshingly honest comments about her postpartum experience and it's made us love her even more. Our hearts were broken when the Your Friends and Neighbors actress revealed she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer last year, but she's chosen not to hide her journey as evidenced by a Skims ad she was featured in. The fact she's also being honest about her fertility journey feels like the admirable frankness we've come to expect from her.
Scroll to see everything Olivia Munn said about her postpartum journey!
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
As the cover star of Self Magazine's latest issue, Olivia Munn opened up her career, health, and what it felt like after she had her son Malcolm. Of that time period, she said she was "operating normally" while also "feeling very depressed." However, she said things took a turn after she noticed a couple of things.
"It kicked into high gear when I hadn’t lost the baby weight, and nothing was fitting, and I would see people on social media, people I knew had babies around the same time. I reached out to some of them. And I’m like, ‘How are you in these Valentino shorts and this crop top just running around LA and having the energy to take all these beautiful pictures?'"
As a first-time mom who had tons of negative thoughts about her postpartum body, I totally get it.
However, Olivia didn't feel like pretending things were fine. "I didn’t even have the ability to fake it. I didn’t have the energy to fake anything they were faking." But she also mourned having a different experience with her and John Mulaney's second child, Meí June.
"It was devastating for me not to be able to carry [Méi]. I loved carrying my son. But postpartum was 'brutal,' she admits. Adding that "anxiety hit a month after Malcolm was born," the actress dove into detail about what looked like for her.
"My eyes pop open at 4 a.m. I’m gasping for air. I get the tightness in my chest, and it’s like that all day long. It felt like the end of the world…. It was like when you watch a horror movie—the worst, scariest horror movie you can think of—that’s how my body felt," she said.
It was so debilitating that she'd "have to sometimes hold John's arm from room to room." By that point, there was talks of her becoming medicated to get through her anxiety, but Olivia dropped another bombshell.
"...by the time I was talking about it, I was so far gone that even if you put a pill in my hand, I wouldn’t have taken it. When the depression or the anxiety takes over you so much, it’s almost like you won’t take the things that will help you."
On top of this, Olivia Munn struggled with breastfeeding due to a low milk supply. She said, "When you stop breastfeeding immediately, your hormones drop, and postpartum can come in like a tornado. And I didn’t clock any of that and I didn’t tell anybody about that. Then it was like I fell off a cliff, and I was just falling and falling and falling and falling. It was more difficult than going through cancer."
Oof, I can relate to the sudden change in breastfeeding instead of gradually slowing down. Although every mother's experience is different, it doesn't change the fact postpartum depression is very real and can be caused by a number of factors.
What do you think about Olivia Munn's experience?
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