A week later

Last week when I said I was in the depths of darkness, I wasn’t being dramatic.

I didn’t see a way out of what I was feeling. I wanted to burn my life to the ground and disappear.

One of the things that scared me the most over the past several weeks was my mental health.

I’m not someone who struggles with mental health issues on a regular basis and I would never seek to minimize the experiences of do. I don’t pretend to know what that’s like and frankly I’m nowhere near as strong as my friends who fight this battle daily.

What I know is this was not my normal and it scared me.

There’s no correct way to handle grief, but I have to imagine a lot of how I was feeling in the days immediately following our baby’s death had to do with my massive hormonal changes and the medicine I was pumping into my body.

Over the past two months I was legitimately concerned about how I would react if this didn’t work out. Of course we wanted to be positive. Of course I had days when I truly believed my body, which has a long history of not letting me down, would again not let me down.

But then there were days when I thought a failed IVF cycle would lead me to do something unsafe or ill-advised – to run away or worse.

I did the only thing I knew to do when I felt this – I warned people around me. I told them I was afraid of what might happen or what I might do. And, to be totally honest, only two of those people seemed to really take me seriously.

Thankfully, one of them was Russ. Russ who gently reminded me I could run away, but I’d need to tell him where I was going so he could meet me.

When I said in my last post that I was in the depths of darkness after we lost Speck, I meant it. I was legitimately scared and lost and unsure how to handle it.

But I’m here a week later and a lot of the extra hormones have already worked their way out of my body – and I’m feeling more rational.

I no longer feel the need to burn my life to the ground or disappear.

I hurt.

My heart aches.

I’m afraid of the uncertainty of our chances going forward.

But I feel like I can face the grief.

This is not something I’d wish on anyone. More than that, this is not something I’d wish for anyone to go through alone.

We’ve chosen to share this experience for a number of reasons. Right now, it feels most important to me to be raw and honest in sharing our story because we won’t be the last people to go through this.

This may not even be the last time we go through it.

But it’s okay to not be okay. It’s normal to not be okay. And it’s important to let someone know you’re not okay.