Want to know how to zap all of your emotional energy for the day? Deal with the US health system. That will drain you, instantly.

This has the potential to heal and restore relationships or completely destroy them. Such is the way of many things in life I guess. I think my brain is working really hard to protect me from all those possible outcomes.

Thanksgiving is difficult to people in grief because it feels like we need to forget that we are also grieving

What’s your greatest fear in life? This question popped into my head the other day. Maybe it’s because the 11 year old I had been watching a few days before wanted to watch a horror movie and was mortified that I was too scared to watch it with him

I’ve analyzed so many decisions and wondered ‘would I be happier if I’d done X differently?’ And in the end the answer is no. There are challenges no matter what decision you make. A single decision doesn’t make you happy or unhappy. It’s simply a decision.

In life there are times when the people around you go through hell and you have to sit by and hold space for them to grieve. It’s uncomfortable. It’s ugly. It’s a big knot of anxiety in your stomach.

Want to know how to shut down a conversation quickly? Bring up infertility, miscarriage or baby loss. They are DOWNER of topics, and yet, for the person dealing with them it’s the biggest part of their life. This post discusses some of the reasons people don’t bring up these sensitive topics.

When the biggest thing in your life is either a taboo subject or something your afraid to talk about, how do you connect with people? How do you engage in a meaningful way?

I didn’t expect it to get easier, but I definitely didn’t expect it to get harder. And by ‘it’ I mean watching other people’s families mature while I stay stuck in infertility.

Sex Ed in school should be renamed reproductive and fertility health. We need to spend more time educating kids on how the reproductive system actually works (hormones, getting pregnant, miscarriage, infertility) and less time on how to NOT get pregnant

Part of me was panicked that the results would show something was actually wrong, the other part of me was worried something wouldn’t be wrong. I asked the doctor if it was better to have something wrong because then you have a path forward or if it was better for everything to be fine.

There are many things I wish I had known 6 years ago when we were first starting on the journey of trying to conceive including how to pick a doctor, how to use an OPK correctly, how to be an advocate for yourself and much more.

What defines a woman? Is it her body, her job, her thought process? How she shows up in the world? All of the definitions I’ve had of ‘woman’ have been challenged over the years.

Sitting in the office, getting no showed by someone, after receiving a difficult phone call I couldn’t stop the tears. Sometimes you gotta let them out in order to move on.

Part of this frustrating journey is our stupid health care system in the US. No system is or ever will be perfect. However, the system we have in the US is so obviously not intended to be for the benefit of the patient

What’s the hardest thing I’ve gone through in my life? Navigating hopelessness. Getting up every day. Doing my hair. Going to work. Looking normal on the outside while being a vessel of sorrow on the inside

Another year is gone. But it wasn’t useless. It wasn’t hopeless. We aren’t one track people. Some of my life was sad and hopeless, but some of it was full of joy and happiness. We don’t get to only pick the fun emotions. We get them all. We don’t get to pick what is hard and what is happy. Life throws that at us and our job is to figure out how to handle and process it all. I am grateful for what I have today, and I am also grieving what I thought I’d have by age 31.

Hindsight is 20/20. The last few days have been full of multiple shame spirals, anger, depression, frustration, but also gratefulness for my tribe.

I don’t even hear my small gut/voice very much. I have to really listen hard. I have to filter out the noise and then translate if what I’m hearing is emotional baggage, societal pressure or that small voice. I constantly question myself. I justify if what I’m hearing is accurate or if I’m infusing my own selfish desires into the mix

“Are you ok?” My brother Asa asked me. He had come downstairs and found me staring blankly at the walls in the basement. I replied that it’s just part of my process to visualize how I want a space to look. I have to just kind of sit and stare and imagine the possibilities.