What you don't see
***I wrote this post about a year ago. I was in the midst of trying to reconnect with 7 women who were very good friends who had babies and who I needed to step back from while I was dealing with my own terrible time. Reconnecting has been hard, necessary work and I have learned a lot. The biggest revelation for me was that they felt excluded from my life, whereas from my end of things it felt like my world just got smaller and smaller until there was almost nothing left. It didn't feel like there was anything going on in my world that someone could be excluded from, I was such a depressed mess. So I wrote this, thinking maybe it would explain that a bit more. I never actually sent this to any of them, or published it before now, but I've been re-reading it and I think it's still good and still says what I was trying to say. A few weeks ago I said I thought I was stuck because this is hard stuff to think about and write about. There is more to it as well, but this is a start. Also, I am happy to report that all of these wonderful gracious women have reached back and our friendships continue after the rather large bump in the road.***
As I have reached out to you, my important women, I have been realizing/learning more about your end of what it felt like to have me disappear.
The following is my attempt to explain what things felt like for me.
I hope this helps clarify why I did what I did.
Of course, you are all entitled to your feelings, and I can understand how it would be hurtful to be missing a friend during a significant time during your life.
I really need you all to know, though: I didn't disappear to hurt you. I disappeared because I was in so much pain, I could barely breathe. That's the honest truth. Sometimes my pain came out looking like anger or jealousy and if you got the brunt of that, I am truly sorry and take full responsibility for my bad behavior.
Towards the end, though, I was just so so so so sad. I have never been sad like that. It is HORRIBLE.
Also: you had each other. I was alone. By my choice, yes. But by necessity: also yes.
Imagine this:
You are lucky enough to have many long-term, vitally important friendships with women from various aspects of your life. These women have been your sisters, essentially, for anywhere from 30 to 10 years, and everything in between. These are women you've held when they've cried, and vice versa. You have gone on many planned and unplanned adventures together through many ups and downs of life. You tell each other what things will be like when you're all together in the old folks home. These women make up parts of your identity; you have been entwined in each others' worlds during formative years and have made each other stronger and better.
Consciously or unconsciously, you thought you'd be going on some of the same adventures with these women, even though you may now be separated by half a continent or only a few blocks, you thought you'd eventually be climbing the same mountain together, at roughly the same time. You all start preparing for this adventure of a life time: partners are secured, supplies acquired, jobs in hand to get enough money and stability to give it a try. One by one, the friends announce they are starting their journey with excitement and trepidation. Except for one. She tries so hard. She finds a wonderful partner, and they start planning for their own trip up this mountain right away, but things keep going wrong. What they are doing isn't working. Friends keep making their own announcements - some even go on the same trip twice. Meanwhile, this one is starting to realize that she may never get to go on that trip. It becomes unbearable to think about the fact that all her lifelong women are doing the thing it is becoming clear that she may never do. She tries another path; it is also blocked. She tries that path again and again and again and again: blocked every time. She looks long and hard at that mountain that all of her friends are on and realizes 'That is never going to be me'. It all becomes too much. Even if her friends are kind and sensitive and try not to talk too much about their own journey up the mountain, the knowledge that they are up there is killing her on the inside. She cannot bear it. This is not the life she imagined for herself. Merely being near someone one who is achieving what she cannot hurts so much, there aren't words for it. She has to turn away from the mountain and figure out how to move forward if the mountain isn't going to be part of her life. She has gaping wounds from all her attempts that need to heal. Her energy is consumed by making it to the bed at the end of every day. She can't celebrate with her friends on their journeys. She can barely keep moving forward on flat ground. The wounds are the kind that need to heal from the bottom up; no bandaid will work. Instead, healing is a painful slow process with tiny steps forward and massive steps back, and the only way to do it is to limit the times the wounds are re-opened. When she finally gets some of herself back, and to her enormous surprise finds herself on a totally different path up that mountain she was sure she wouldn't be part of, she gains the courage and energy to turn back around and face these women who have been doing this thing together, while she has been alone, trying to heal.
Spoons
After our last transfer of our last two embryos failed in May 2016, I went to the bookstore. Big mistake, by the way. Mother's day was around the corner. I was desperate for something to take me out of my head and allow me some reprieve from my intense and ever-growing sadness. As I walked through the store, 'MOTHER'S DAY' gifts stabbing me in the heart all the way through, this cover caught my eye, and I latched on like it was a life raft.
The tag line spoke right to me, and I bought that freaking book, even though it was full price and hardcover - the two ways to NEVER buy books.
We had planned a weekend away at one of our favourite spots for the week after we got our results, figuring we'd either be celebrating or drowning our sorrows in wine, pine trees, and jumps in an icy cold lake after roasting ourselves in a simmering sauna. It was the latter, obviously.
I think I read this book 2 or 3 times that weekend, mostly through tears. I have also read it several times since. It is mostly about the author's struggles with various mental illnesses, but I found much of it to be highly applicable to the situation I was in.
Perhaps the part that resonated the most was about spoons. Yes, spoons. She described it like this: every day everyone gets a certain amount of spoons to 'spend'. Everything you do and every person you interact with costs you spoons. Sometimes, at the end of the day, you have lots of spoons left over. Sometimes, you run out of spoons before you even get out of bed. Still a little unclear?
Let's say everyone get 100 spoons a day. Getting out of bed: 1 spoon. Having a shower: 1 spoon. Organizing food for yourself: 3 spoons. Having a conversation with your spouse: 1 spoon. And so on and so forth. If you're lucky, there will be things during the day that credit you some spoons. For me, outside time always gives me spoons back. But here's where things get complicated. The amount of spoons things cost depends wildly on how you are doing. For her, with mental illness and for me, with an unbearably deep sadness, all of a sudden basic things take up all your spoons AND, double whammy, things that normally gave you spoons back don't. Now, they may cost you spoons.
My previous job cost me a lot of spoons. A LOT of spoons. I was dealing with high-crisis situations with very very vulnerable children on a very regular basis. There was no getting ahead of the curve of crisis, especially because another thing that was taking up a lot of spoons was the 3rd year of trying and failing to get pregnant. Work easily took up 50 spoons a day and infertility took another 45. So that left 5 spoons for everything else. If we got outside, maybe I'd get an extra 5 spoons, but the breaks were few and far between. Years like that are why the word 'slog' was invented, I think. Survival was all I was able to do. Of course, at the time, it didn't always feel that bad, but it did feel a lot like treading water. I'd go to bed early, not be able to sleep for 3 or 4 hours in the middle, and wake up exhausted, then do it all again. Throw in some scheduled, boring sex in there and, well, there wasn't a lot left over for friends or family, let alone friends or family that were pregnant or nursing.
For me to preserve my sanity and manage to move forward, I had to limit where my spoons were going. I very nearly isolated myself completely. I stopped going to functions with friends and sometimes avoided family as well. If I saw people, it was 1 at a time, and we spent much of the time crying. I didn't call, text, or reach out to people. I spent a lot of time by myself, staring at the wall. Or, listening to Gilmore Girls to try and quell the voices in my head. That was all I had the spoons for.
When I switched jobs, I was excited to liberate some of my spoons! I thought things would be easier. And at work, they really were. I didn't fully realize (maybe because you never really can while you're in it and surviving) how much my job was hurting me until I didn't have to do it any more. My new job definitely freed up a lot of spoons, and for the month of September, it was great. But repeated IVF attempts quickly ate up all my newly-liberated spoons. There is a study, somewhere, that researched the physical and emotional stress on a woman undergoing IVF and concluded it is comparable to the emotional and physical stress of undergoing cancer treatment. Again, at the time, you don't necessarily realize WHY you feel so run-down all the time, but in retrospect it is crystal clear. ALL my energy was being eaten up trying to figure out what to do to make things work. I barely had energy left for Jake, let alone anyone else.
And then, at the end, when the last one also didn't work, I went into a serious overdraft with my spoons. WAY in the red. So far, I couldn't see the bottom. The climb out has not been not easy, and, to be 100% honest, isn't complete yet. There are still days when I am so incredibly sad and anxious. Days where I'm sure that something will go wrong with the nugget on the way and we won't get another chance. Days where I'm mad that my family planning decisions are completely dependent on a huge gift from another woman, not on the abilities of my own body.
What you don't see
I can see how, for some of the women I isolated myself from, it would be hard to buy the fact that I was struggling with serious anxiety, depression, exhaustion, stress, fear, and existential crisis. After all, on instagram, my life looks pretty effing good. So here's what you don't see....
We went to Folk Fest. My anxiety was sky-high. We didn't camp with my usual crew, and we didn't join the big group at the tarp in the evenings most of the time. What you don't see is that Jake and I are alone, doing our own thing, avoiding our friends. Being together with my friends and hanging out on the tarps in the evenings has always been one of my favorite parts of Folk Fest. But not in 2016.
Shortly after Folk Fest, I went canoeing with some of my girls. This is an annual trip, although it didn't happen in 2015. What the pictures don't show is that an innocent question/conversation starter from one of my friends sent me very nearly into full-on panic mode. I left the fire and conversation, contemplated going to bed, but instead got in the lake and floated under the stars and tried to calm myself down so the trip wouldn't be entirely ruined.
We went east on our road trip this year, through the States to Maine (which is so beautiful) and then up to Nova Scotia to visit these yahoos. We had a lot of fun. But what all of these pictures don't show is the panic attack I had on the road leading to their house and the breaks I had to take when things began to be too much. I love Jake's sister and her children so much, but being with people just took so many spoons; I didn't always have enough.
Another stop was a family reunion in Thornbury. This is me and my sister and cousin jumping into gorgeous Lake Huron. It was one afternoon of our family reunion. What the pictures from this weekend don't show is the massive panic attack I had as I walked in the door of my aunt and uncle's house. My mom had to come talk me down as I sobbed in the garage while Jake had to fend for himself in a room full of relatives he had only met at our wedding and who had just seen me leave in tears. Jake and I didn't stay at the house with everyone. We arrived late and left early for the weekend and I avoided the babies. I LOVE family gatherings. And while things got better as the weekend went on, it was still a very stressful few days for me and I teared up more than once.
Over the last 4 years I have spent a lot of time out in the Whiteshell, at a few spots in particular. I go there when the world is too much and I need to listen to nature. This is one of those days. I went by myself. I believe this weekend was during the stressful time of final details being organized for surrogacy and I needed to find some centering. I have spoken to several other women who have had or are thinking of having a baby via gestational carrier and they all talk about the hope they had. I had hope too, I guess, (I honestly don't know where I found it) but mostly I just went through the motions. I really didn't expect it to work, especially not on the first try. I was numb from pain. Being out in the trees and with water and rocks was the only thing that could soothe me and give me some spoons back.
My mumsie and me enjoying breakfast on the dock at High Lake on Thanksgiving weekend. What this picture doesn't show is that the rest of our family is together at L and L's. I couldn't face a weekend of close family time; it was too stressful, so Jake and I didn't go. We rented this spot of renewal and mourning (we've gone there during our saddest times, and it has always found a way to heal us) and invited mom to come up for 1 of our 3 nights.
There are countless pictures like this: it looks like life is perfect and great and I'm having so much fun but pictures never tell the whole story. It's easy to snap a shot that highlights what is right - much much harder to capture everything else behind the scenes.
The only witness to how truly and completely unraveled I have been is Jake. Bless him, he's been with me through it all and loved me completely through it.
The only thing I can do is take responsibility for myself. I am so deeply sorry to have missed out on pieces of your lives. I hope this makes it more clear about what I was/am working through and what I have needed to do to survive.
Communication goes two ways. Thank you so much to people who have reached back and communicated with me. I am in no way interested in pretending this part of my life didn't happen. I am open to working with you, my friends, to get our friendships back.
All that said, if you feel like you can't reach back, then I will also respect that. I did what I had to do, you will do what you have to do. I will be very sorry to lose you, though. I will grieve that loss along with my embryos that never became babies; the loss of my body, mind, sanity, and inner peace; the loss of my faith in my inner self; in the pieces of your lives that I couldn't see through my sadness and pain.
As I have reached out to you, my important women, I have been realizing/learning more about your end of what it felt like to have me disappear.
The following is my attempt to explain what things felt like for me.
I hope this helps clarify why I did what I did.
Of course, you are all entitled to your feelings, and I can understand how it would be hurtful to be missing a friend during a significant time during your life.
I really need you all to know, though: I didn't disappear to hurt you. I disappeared because I was in so much pain, I could barely breathe. That's the honest truth. Sometimes my pain came out looking like anger or jealousy and if you got the brunt of that, I am truly sorry and take full responsibility for my bad behavior.
Towards the end, though, I was just so so so so sad. I have never been sad like that. It is HORRIBLE.
Also: you had each other. I was alone. By my choice, yes. But by necessity: also yes.
Imagine this:
You are lucky enough to have many long-term, vitally important friendships with women from various aspects of your life. These women have been your sisters, essentially, for anywhere from 30 to 10 years, and everything in between. These are women you've held when they've cried, and vice versa. You have gone on many planned and unplanned adventures together through many ups and downs of life. You tell each other what things will be like when you're all together in the old folks home. These women make up parts of your identity; you have been entwined in each others' worlds during formative years and have made each other stronger and better.
Consciously or unconsciously, you thought you'd be going on some of the same adventures with these women, even though you may now be separated by half a continent or only a few blocks, you thought you'd eventually be climbing the same mountain together, at roughly the same time. You all start preparing for this adventure of a life time: partners are secured, supplies acquired, jobs in hand to get enough money and stability to give it a try. One by one, the friends announce they are starting their journey with excitement and trepidation. Except for one. She tries so hard. She finds a wonderful partner, and they start planning for their own trip up this mountain right away, but things keep going wrong. What they are doing isn't working. Friends keep making their own announcements - some even go on the same trip twice. Meanwhile, this one is starting to realize that she may never get to go on that trip. It becomes unbearable to think about the fact that all her lifelong women are doing the thing it is becoming clear that she may never do. She tries another path; it is also blocked. She tries that path again and again and again and again: blocked every time. She looks long and hard at that mountain that all of her friends are on and realizes 'That is never going to be me'. It all becomes too much. Even if her friends are kind and sensitive and try not to talk too much about their own journey up the mountain, the knowledge that they are up there is killing her on the inside. She cannot bear it. This is not the life she imagined for herself. Merely being near someone one who is achieving what she cannot hurts so much, there aren't words for it. She has to turn away from the mountain and figure out how to move forward if the mountain isn't going to be part of her life. She has gaping wounds from all her attempts that need to heal. Her energy is consumed by making it to the bed at the end of every day. She can't celebrate with her friends on their journeys. She can barely keep moving forward on flat ground. The wounds are the kind that need to heal from the bottom up; no bandaid will work. Instead, healing is a painful slow process with tiny steps forward and massive steps back, and the only way to do it is to limit the times the wounds are re-opened. When she finally gets some of herself back, and to her enormous surprise finds herself on a totally different path up that mountain she was sure she wouldn't be part of, she gains the courage and energy to turn back around and face these women who have been doing this thing together, while she has been alone, trying to heal.
Spoons
After our last transfer of our last two embryos failed in May 2016, I went to the bookstore. Big mistake, by the way. Mother's day was around the corner. I was desperate for something to take me out of my head and allow me some reprieve from my intense and ever-growing sadness. As I walked through the store, 'MOTHER'S DAY' gifts stabbing me in the heart all the way through, this cover caught my eye, and I latched on like it was a life raft.
The tag line spoke right to me, and I bought that freaking book, even though it was full price and hardcover - the two ways to NEVER buy books.
We had planned a weekend away at one of our favourite spots for the week after we got our results, figuring we'd either be celebrating or drowning our sorrows in wine, pine trees, and jumps in an icy cold lake after roasting ourselves in a simmering sauna. It was the latter, obviously.
I think I read this book 2 or 3 times that weekend, mostly through tears. I have also read it several times since. It is mostly about the author's struggles with various mental illnesses, but I found much of it to be highly applicable to the situation I was in.
Perhaps the part that resonated the most was about spoons. Yes, spoons. She described it like this: every day everyone gets a certain amount of spoons to 'spend'. Everything you do and every person you interact with costs you spoons. Sometimes, at the end of the day, you have lots of spoons left over. Sometimes, you run out of spoons before you even get out of bed. Still a little unclear?
Let's say everyone get 100 spoons a day. Getting out of bed: 1 spoon. Having a shower: 1 spoon. Organizing food for yourself: 3 spoons. Having a conversation with your spouse: 1 spoon. And so on and so forth. If you're lucky, there will be things during the day that credit you some spoons. For me, outside time always gives me spoons back. But here's where things get complicated. The amount of spoons things cost depends wildly on how you are doing. For her, with mental illness and for me, with an unbearably deep sadness, all of a sudden basic things take up all your spoons AND, double whammy, things that normally gave you spoons back don't. Now, they may cost you spoons.
My previous job cost me a lot of spoons. A LOT of spoons. I was dealing with high-crisis situations with very very vulnerable children on a very regular basis. There was no getting ahead of the curve of crisis, especially because another thing that was taking up a lot of spoons was the 3rd year of trying and failing to get pregnant. Work easily took up 50 spoons a day and infertility took another 45. So that left 5 spoons for everything else. If we got outside, maybe I'd get an extra 5 spoons, but the breaks were few and far between. Years like that are why the word 'slog' was invented, I think. Survival was all I was able to do. Of course, at the time, it didn't always feel that bad, but it did feel a lot like treading water. I'd go to bed early, not be able to sleep for 3 or 4 hours in the middle, and wake up exhausted, then do it all again. Throw in some scheduled, boring sex in there and, well, there wasn't a lot left over for friends or family, let alone friends or family that were pregnant or nursing.
For me to preserve my sanity and manage to move forward, I had to limit where my spoons were going. I very nearly isolated myself completely. I stopped going to functions with friends and sometimes avoided family as well. If I saw people, it was 1 at a time, and we spent much of the time crying. I didn't call, text, or reach out to people. I spent a lot of time by myself, staring at the wall. Or, listening to Gilmore Girls to try and quell the voices in my head. That was all I had the spoons for.
When I switched jobs, I was excited to liberate some of my spoons! I thought things would be easier. And at work, they really were. I didn't fully realize (maybe because you never really can while you're in it and surviving) how much my job was hurting me until I didn't have to do it any more. My new job definitely freed up a lot of spoons, and for the month of September, it was great. But repeated IVF attempts quickly ate up all my newly-liberated spoons. There is a study, somewhere, that researched the physical and emotional stress on a woman undergoing IVF and concluded it is comparable to the emotional and physical stress of undergoing cancer treatment. Again, at the time, you don't necessarily realize WHY you feel so run-down all the time, but in retrospect it is crystal clear. ALL my energy was being eaten up trying to figure out what to do to make things work. I barely had energy left for Jake, let alone anyone else.
And then, at the end, when the last one also didn't work, I went into a serious overdraft with my spoons. WAY in the red. So far, I couldn't see the bottom. The climb out has not been not easy, and, to be 100% honest, isn't complete yet. There are still days when I am so incredibly sad and anxious. Days where I'm sure that something will go wrong with the nugget on the way and we won't get another chance. Days where I'm mad that my family planning decisions are completely dependent on a huge gift from another woman, not on the abilities of my own body.
What you don't see
I can see how, for some of the women I isolated myself from, it would be hard to buy the fact that I was struggling with serious anxiety, depression, exhaustion, stress, fear, and existential crisis. After all, on instagram, my life looks pretty effing good. So here's what you don't see....
Shortly after Folk Fest, I went canoeing with some of my girls. This is an annual trip, although it didn't happen in 2015. What the pictures don't show is that an innocent question/conversation starter from one of my friends sent me very nearly into full-on panic mode. I left the fire and conversation, contemplated going to bed, but instead got in the lake and floated under the stars and tried to calm myself down so the trip wouldn't be entirely ruined.
We went east on our road trip this year, through the States to Maine (which is so beautiful) and then up to Nova Scotia to visit these yahoos. We had a lot of fun. But what all of these pictures don't show is the panic attack I had on the road leading to their house and the breaks I had to take when things began to be too much. I love Jake's sister and her children so much, but being with people just took so many spoons; I didn't always have enough.
Another stop was a family reunion in Thornbury. This is me and my sister and cousin jumping into gorgeous Lake Huron. It was one afternoon of our family reunion. What the pictures from this weekend don't show is the massive panic attack I had as I walked in the door of my aunt and uncle's house. My mom had to come talk me down as I sobbed in the garage while Jake had to fend for himself in a room full of relatives he had only met at our wedding and who had just seen me leave in tears. Jake and I didn't stay at the house with everyone. We arrived late and left early for the weekend and I avoided the babies. I LOVE family gatherings. And while things got better as the weekend went on, it was still a very stressful few days for me and I teared up more than once.
Over the last 4 years I have spent a lot of time out in the Whiteshell, at a few spots in particular. I go there when the world is too much and I need to listen to nature. This is one of those days. I went by myself. I believe this weekend was during the stressful time of final details being organized for surrogacy and I needed to find some centering. I have spoken to several other women who have had or are thinking of having a baby via gestational carrier and they all talk about the hope they had. I had hope too, I guess, (I honestly don't know where I found it) but mostly I just went through the motions. I really didn't expect it to work, especially not on the first try. I was numb from pain. Being out in the trees and with water and rocks was the only thing that could soothe me and give me some spoons back.
My mumsie and me enjoying breakfast on the dock at High Lake on Thanksgiving weekend. What this picture doesn't show is that the rest of our family is together at L and L's. I couldn't face a weekend of close family time; it was too stressful, so Jake and I didn't go. We rented this spot of renewal and mourning (we've gone there during our saddest times, and it has always found a way to heal us) and invited mom to come up for 1 of our 3 nights.
There are countless pictures like this: it looks like life is perfect and great and I'm having so much fun but pictures never tell the whole story. It's easy to snap a shot that highlights what is right - much much harder to capture everything else behind the scenes.
The only witness to how truly and completely unraveled I have been is Jake. Bless him, he's been with me through it all and loved me completely through it.
The only thing I can do is take responsibility for myself. I am so deeply sorry to have missed out on pieces of your lives. I hope this makes it more clear about what I was/am working through and what I have needed to do to survive.
Communication goes two ways. Thank you so much to people who have reached back and communicated with me. I am in no way interested in pretending this part of my life didn't happen. I am open to working with you, my friends, to get our friendships back.
All that said, if you feel like you can't reach back, then I will also respect that. I did what I had to do, you will do what you have to do. I will be very sorry to lose you, though. I will grieve that loss along with my embryos that never became babies; the loss of my body, mind, sanity, and inner peace; the loss of my faith in my inner self; in the pieces of your lives that I couldn't see through my sadness and pain.
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