Emotional Handholds
Sometimes it happens. I drop a post in the Roundup, which usually releases it from my brain. But then I continue to think about it the next week.
A case in point, Infertile Phoenix’s post about Too Much and Not Enough. I kept coming back to the idea of how we use tiny good moments to get through the hard ones, but what do you do when there are no tiny good moments? In moments of great grief, the sadness swallows up the happiness. A cookie just can’t stand up to loss, and it’s unfair to put that on a cookie.
She writes: “I don’t know how I endured infertility. I couldn’t enjoy the little things back then. I don’t know how I got through those years. I can barely believe I survived.”
How did I get through those years? The only thing that made me feel happy was the hope, and the hope was the thing that made me feel terrible at the end of each failed cycle. There was no cookie, no trip, no book, no music that could clear away the heaviness.
And when there are no emotional hand holds, it is hard to keep pulling yourself up.
But how do you find those emotional handholds when it feels like you’re facing a wall of stone?
3 comments
Yes.
Hope kept me going. Then the loss of hope just about floored me, until I the hope I held was a hope for something new. And sometimes, that’s what it was – “I hope I will one day hope for something new” is how it started. That’s how I faced the wall of stone – by turning away and facing a direction that I could actually take.
Yes. I agree. I feel this right now, but not fertility-related so much.
I also love Mali’s statement of “I hope for something new” instead of hoping for the same thing that doesn’t materialize. That was helpful when it became clear that all the hoping in the world wasn’t going to work for us. I mean, I spent a lot of time facedown on the floor, too, but eventually the “something new” took hold. It is a terrible feeling when you are at the bottom of that pit and it looks way too deep to ever climb out of. Bit by bit, one thing at a time, like Phoenix says.