Lingua Franca, the quirky knitwear brand with a long list of celeb endorsements, has a new collab with Kenneth Cole to support the Mental Health Coalition.
You may not have heard of Lingua Franca — Rachelle Hruska’s trendy, high-end knitwear line — but there’s a good chance you’ve seen its products. The brand’s cashmere sweaters, which you can buy hand-embroidered with pithy, often topical phrases (i.e. “i read banned books” or “my job is beach”) or custom design, have become a favorite in Hollywood. Meryl Streep wore a striped LF sweater that read “time’s up” — a nod to gender equality efforts — in the signature script in an appearance on Ellen, Julianne Moore snapped a selfie in a red crewneck with “fight like a mother” stitched onto it, Connie Britton’s a documented fan, and Katie rocks a “check yourself” sweater, which is part of her Lingua Franca breast cancer collection. The enthusiasm doesn’t end there: The brand’s Instagram is littered with many more celebrity endorsements.
The company has a fascinating origin story. At the time, Hruska was running her digital media company, Guest of a Guest, which she grew from her personal blog, and she’d just had her second child with her husband, the hotelier Sean MacPherson. The two had built an enviable life, with two beautiful boys and homes in Manhattan and Montauk, but Hruska was struggling.
“My mind would race: You will have a panic attack again, you always are having them, why wouldn’t you have one now? You will have one and you will pass out and you will leave your 2-year-old and infant in the middle of a street in New York City with no one there,” Hruska wrote in an essay.
“I couldn’t leave the house with my children alone. I was spending my mornings in bed crying and spent almost every shower on the floor.”
She was being swallowed by her postpartum depression when her therapist suggested she try calming her anxiety by doing something with her hands. She decided on embroidery, an activity she hadn’t done since she was a kid with her grandmother, and began stitching “booyah” (something her 2-year-old was fond of saying) onto an old sweater, Hruska tells us. From there, Lingua Franca took off.
“The entire company was basically built around my mental illness,” she says. That’s why when she was approached by the fashion icon, Kenneth Cole, to build a capsule collection to support his nonprofit, The Mental Health Coalition, Hruska jumped at the chance. This week, they’ve previewed two sweaters: one with “i have issues” embroidered on it and another that reads “almost normal.” (“We started off with f**k normal, but I thought let’s keep it clean — I want something my parents will be able to wear,” Hruska says.) Ten percent of proceeds will go toward the organization focused on ending the stigma around mental illness.
“I’ve admired Lingua Franca’s product and messaging for a while, and am inspired by Rachelle’s personal courage and willingness to share her own story, in the hope of making it easier for others to tell theirs,” Cole tells us.
Below, you can read Hruska’s raw, moving essay about her struggle with postpartum, her period of horrifying panic attacks and “black days,” her fear of being judged, and how she ultimately was able to find help and manage her anxiety.
You would have thought an alarm might have gone off in my head the afternoon when, while my 4-month-old was soundly sleeping, I decided I must quickly gather up all of our kitchen knives and hide them away, safe and sound in our garage (read: out of my reach). It didn’t. The days where I couldn’t hold my baby next to windows or walk down the stairs with him just became my new “normal.”
No alarms went off in my head ringing “Wooowoooowoooo! You are acting like a crazy person!” These instances, and dozens of others to follow, were all easily rationalized in my head. They had been slowly building up over the years.
I had been making excuses for my anxiety-produced behaviors almost my entire adult life and I was pretty good at it. Things that probably seem a little crazy (walking up 14 flights of stairs for a meeting in midtown instead of taking the elevator), were just my norm. I knew my trigger points (elevators: bad, stairs: good, subway cars: bad, cabs: good, planes: very bad), and that made life manageable. I had adapted to my anxiety.
But over time, my anxiety was quietly, and stealthily morphing — from small muted voices telling me that the elevator I was standing inside of or the airplane I was sitting inside of was just a giant metal death trap waiting to engulf me into…well…how can I put this? Remember Mel Gibson’s crazy character Jerry in the movie Conspiracy Theory? I can relate.
I couldn’t breathe anymore.
I was paranoid about everything. Tortured by the thought of death, thoughts of hurting my children, the unknown, the cracks in our basement walls, bunched-up rugs in my living room. At night I lay awake for hours, ruminating on both the petty and the significant.
How were “normal” people getting through their days? At some point, walking down Jane Street alone, I had a legit interior mental breakdown. Our friend Maria had died months earlier. And I couldn’t get over that she had just disappeared into the ether. I kept wondering, where did she go? Where was she now? Why does any of this matter? I was desperately seeking the divine. It felt like the Tasmanian Devil was spiraling around my head and my brain would explode all over the cobblestone streets.
Here’s the thing, it’s like that rule about love: you never find it when you’re looking for it. And, when you’re desperate to find the answers to the hardest questions that exist, you just find yourself further away from what you are looking for. At least I did.
Looking back at my Instagram from this time, I looked like a happy new mother. But, oh you guys, I was basically a jumbled mess of slush on the inside.
I didn’t get postpartum the way most people told me I would. The birth of my first son, Maxwell, was pretty ideal. I had an epidural, a swift but not aggressively fast labor, and he was an incredible baby — he breastfed easily, and slept through the night at four weeks. Life was good. After the birth of my second son, Dash, whose labor was three weeks early and totally intense (so fast I didn’t have time for an epidural), I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. I didn’t realize the anxiety was ratcheting up slowly until it was too late. Also having a 1-year-old on the side — that was a whole new experience. I started feeling incapable of doing basic things, things that I reasoned every capable and competent mother should be able to do. Things like taking my kids on a walk to the farmer’s market, the playground, or gymnastics class alone. Alone being the operative word.
After a while (much later I realized it was right after I stopped breastfeeding), I didn’t trust myself to leave the house alone with my boys ever. My mind would race: You will have a panic attack again, you always have them, why wouldn’t you have one now? You will have one and you will pass out and you will leave your 2-year-old and infant in the middle of a street in New York City with no one there.
“They” say it’s harder for one to see themselves than it is for others to see them. For me, there were only a couple of people who truly knew what was going on. The rest of the world had no clue what was going on in my illness-ridden head, myself included; partially because everyone is just trying to get through their own stuff, and partially because I was so good at hiding it — even from myself.
I can’t tell you where the anxiety began (nature, nurture, hormones? Who cares?), but I can tell you this, by baby number two, I wasn’t able to negotiate my way back to safety. I was having panic attacks almost daily. The walls were closing in on me, and not just sporadically, not just on airplanes or in enclosed spaces. They were closing in on me everywhere I went. And so, I mostly just stayed home, the only place I felt safe.
My internal voices almost became poetic in their dire warnings.
I did start having panic attacks while out with my boys. I did have to rush out of gymnastics class with my 2-year-old son and scream for a cab and then slip the driver a note with my husband’s cell phone number on it and ask him to call him if I pass out (or die, if you want to know where my mind really went).
Each panic attack set me back days into depression.
People sometimes ask me what a panic attack feels like. The first one, before I knew what they were, felt like what I imagine a heart attack does. You may have chest pains, confusion, lack of control, hot flashes, and terrifying thoughts. Imagine you’re in a box and the walls are caving in on you. The funny thing is, you don’t get “better” at handling panic attacks with experience, at least I didn’t. For me, every single one felt like death was the absolute ending. There was no question I was going to be dead by the end of it, but at the same time, they felt never-ending.
And, when you constantly feel like you’re dying, everything around you becomes surreal and exhilarating. You adapt to this constant heightened state and it’s unsustainable…so you crash.
I was still working almost full-time. Answering emails and calls as if nothing was out of the ordinary. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was running a website with the tagline: “People, Places, Parties,” and I was terrified of all three.
The day it all came crashing down I was in my car driving my 2-year-old and 6-month-old from my husband’s latest “about to be hip” downtown hotel, which was still in construction. It was a test. I hadn’t driven in months and took half of a Xanax to help with the anxiety. I told myself that I could do it to prove I didn’t need help, that I was getting over it — whatever “it” was. I was strong. I was capable.
I had less than a mile to go.
I could do it! I could do it!
I couldn’t do it and I didn’t. I ended up at the Bowery Hotel — the closest place I could find to stop at that would take me in — in the fetal position in the shower of a room with cold water pouring over me. My babies — one in his stroller, one on the bed — were left watching cartoons in the room with the bellhop, who to this day has a blurred face in my memory.
Sean, my (amazing, loving, understanding) husband, arrived and got in the shower with me, fully clothed. He held me and I knew it was time to get real help. I was lost.
I wish I could tell you that things got better after that, that I saw some genius, high-end doctor, that I got on some meds and went on my hunky-dory way. But they didn’t and I didn’t. After the Bowery incident, it would be six more agonizing months of spiritual advisors, meditation specialists, acupuncture, yoga, and eventually therapists prescribing me Zoloft and Lexapro, which I wouldn’t take because I convinced myself that if I did, it meant I was weak.
There would be many canceled dinner plans, and no parks with my kids alone. There would sadly also be many more days on the floor of our shower. We had such a beautiful shower, and, in between heaving fits of bawling, I would remind myself of the beauty I was surrounded by: a great husband, beautiful children, prosperous careers, a lovely shower with white marble, and even a skylight to let the light pour in! And then I would get even more depressed, feeling so idiotic that I was lying there, incapable of handling all of the beauty bestowed upon me. I was not only lost, I was spoiled and ungrateful. How lame.
My story ends (begins?) with a woman.
I won’t name her, but she’s a very powerful CEO who you’ve probably heard of. I met this woman whom I admired for coffee in Malibu, and I told her everything. I told her I felt like a cloud of darkness was following me everywhere I went and that everyone could feel it when they met me. I told her I felt like a phony, a fraud. I told her I was lost.
This very powerful woman took my hands in hers and told me she was on Lexapro. She started taking it after the birth of her daughter two years ago and it had saved her life. She told me she still had passion, drive, and ideas. She told me it saved her marriage and her life and that I might want to actually give it a try. This super smart and successful woman told me that anxiety was an illness and I shouldn’t be ashamed of treating it. Taking Lexapro didn’t mean I was weak.
I finally listened. I went on Lexapro and started to feel less lost. I continued seeing my therapist and spiritual advisor and introduced some new exercise routines, which allowed my brain to take a backseat and did wonders for my sleep. I pored over ancient Sanskrit texts and dated Christian documents, as well as modern airport self-help best sellers, which I would normally cast off as “junk,” and everything in between. I sought wisdom from Graham Greene, Karl Marx, Thomas Aquinas, Christopher Hitchens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sylvia Plath, Nora Ephron, and Joan Didion, to name a few.
Slowly I was able to start leaving the house again. Months later I would be able to drive my children around town in Montauk without having to stop somewhere in a panic. A year later I would be able to speak in a women’s support group without fear. Today I’m able to write this.
I know there are other women out there like me. I know they’re struggling because they don’t know what to do and feel like losers balled up on their shower floors. Here’s what I want to say to that woman (me) lying there with water dripping in her eyes:
Please know you’re not alone. You’re not weak. You’re the most powerful and capable thing alive: a woman.
Taking drugs to help you with this illness does not mean you have given up. Do not be ashamed. You are not to blame. Just because the world can’t see your struggle doesn’t mean it’s “all in your head.”
It is real.
There are extremely smart, powerful, capable, creative women out there who have been right where you are. You’re lost now but you’re not alone.
