Maybe you have been silently struggling.
Maybe you are so physically and mentally exhausted from counting days, checking the calendar, ovulation tests, pregnancy tests, wishing so badly that when it comes time for your period, you will not get it - the weight of the disappointment when you do.
Maybe you have people close to you that know what you’re going through but they don’t really know the weight that it carries. They don’t really know how much time you spend thinking about it, hoping that something will change, looking for answers, signs and validation. Even when you have people around you that have an idea of what you’re going through, strangers have no idea, they don’t know how close to tears you are when you see them with their babies, their kids, they don’t know how you walk through shops and stores imagining purchasing toys and clothes for a baby you so desperately want.
Maybe you are scared to be hopeful or excited each month because keeping that feeling small and not sharing the excitement feels easier than navigating the devastation.
Maybe you are so tired of feeling guilty or jealous or angry. When someone announces a pregnancy, for feeling angry or jealous when someone close to you, someone you love announces that they’re pregnant. The feeling of anger towards your own body, the feeling that it is betraying you.
Maybe you don’t want to be told to just “stop trying and that’s when it will happen” or that “everything happens for a reason”.
If any of those “maybes” felt familiar or felt true to you, I want you to know something.
You do not have to make yourself or your feelings smaller so that the people around you feel more comfortable.
Two things can exist at once - you can feel happy for someone and feel sad for yourself, you are allowed to have all of the feelings that come alongside trying to conceive. You can be happy in your life, you are allowed to celebrate your life and hope for and grieve parts of it that you do not have. You are allowed to find this hard.
It can be easy for your relationship with your body to change while you are on your fertility journey. You may feel less connected to your body, you may feel like your body is a puzzle, a mystery, something to be solved. I hope that during these moments, you can shift perspective only slightly so that your body is something more than a project, something that needs to be fixed or something that it letting you down. This does not mean you should stop wanting to become pregnant or that shifting your perspective will help you conceive, but because you are a whole person, you are a whole person who deserves love and to feel safe in your body and safe with those around you. You deserve to rest without guilt, information that doesn’t make you feel inadequate or feel like there is something wrong with what you are doing, you deserve space to sit with the heavy feelings without someone trying to rush those feelings away and replace them with something else. You deserve to be held, emotionally as well as physically.
I cannot and will not promise an outcome or that everything happens for a reason or that if you adhere to a regime of just the right treatments, mindset or habits that everything will fall into place for you.
I believe that you deserve to be heard, to be held and to be met with respect exactly where you are. This is a big reason why I created this space.
My name is Maegan, I am a Holistic Reproductive Practitioner and I am not here to “fix” you or to “solve” any of the mysteries or puzzles that you may be trying to figure out within your body. Through this blog/journal I would like to have a space where I can share things that I have learned, stories and experiences from the people around me, explore holistic approaches to well being and have honest conversations about experiences that can feel incredibly lonely.
I want to share what research can tell us, where the evidence is still limited, and what questions might be worth bringing to your healthcare provider. I want to talk about practices that may help you care for yourself through a difficult season, without pretending they can control an outcome they cannot promise.
You do not have to know exactly what it is that you’re looking for when you land here, you do not have to book an appointment, you do not have to reach out to me directly. You can simply just be, be here, be wherever you are in whatever season of life, be whatever emotion is feeling the biggest right now.
You are more than what your body has or hasn’t done this month.
