“What you give your attention to is what you create.” This message came to me during my meditation today. I feel sad, stuck, angry, and forgotten today, so it is a seemingly perfect gift from within. During this same meditation, I saw myself as a woman whose identity is wrapped up in her infertility. Why is that? Why do I want to hang on to this story? It’s not the life I want to have right now - it’s NOT! Is it so I have a story to tell? Do I think it makes me more mysterious? Is this how I’m searching for attention? Or is it none of these and is this just part of my journey? I want to think that it’s just part of my journey and that the reason for all of my suffering is so that I can learn to be with myself to find the wholeness that I crave.

One benefit of struggling with fertility is that we get the chance to navigate scary, unforgiving paths of human struggle. We learn how to cope with things we cannot control and we get a lot of practice on how to grieve. Each month when that dreaded period comes we grieve. We grieve for what could have been, we grieve for another month gone by without success in conceiving, and we grieve the lost hope that we feel in our hearts again. At the same time, we get to be raw and vulnerable with ourselves and let our emotions flow, even when our ugly cries come out. Let that shit out, woman! This is important work! We have the opportunity to learn this before we have children, how cool is that? We get to spend time in meditation and on our yoga mats exploring the uncharted territories of our souls. Setting my struggles aside and stepping out to look within, I realize that this is a gift. Do you agree?

I also read today that research has shown that the impact of infertility in terms of stress levels over a prolonged period of time (2-3 years TTC) is as big as the impact of dealing with potentially terminal illnesses. The struggle is real!!! I say this as a joke a lot, but really, it is.