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This very moving essay about stillbirth and infertility and gardening begins: “A childless friend of mine recalled a time at the grocery store when she locked eyes with a baby in a shopping cart. She said a sharp pain rose up inside her—that it felt like slamming her finger in a car door.”

With so many things in life, you can avoid X by not doing Y, but with those infertility and loss feelings, you cannot stop encountering reminders because those reminders are woven into every aspect of society.

It’s like the separate waiting room discussion from weeks ago.

It’s a gorgeous essay, and you should read it in full because I think a lot of it will resonate.

I’ve been joining a dance class online, and my feelings about it move like a sine wave. There is an in-person option, but I’ve been sticking to the online stream for now despite the people projected on the screen dancing about a mile away. I wanted to make sure I was good enough to join them.

So, for the first part of the wave: I found a local dance class! And then the drop: What if I’m not good anymore? And then the crest: I am so glad technology exists and can join from my living room. And the drop — I don’t remember any of these moves. Up and down. Up and down. I stopped trying to copy the steps and just moved around, doing my own thing because no one could see me. I felt horrible about myself because I was out of shape, and nothing felt familiar.

I sat on the living room floor and watched the tiny figures on the screen all twirling around, the choreography as muscle memory.

I was going to drop the idea, but I discovered that the head of the dance troupe posted the dance list earlier in the day. I could grab the songs, look up the dance steps on YouTube, and learn them before the session. That was the crest of the wave. The drop came when I went to learn the first dance and realized that while I picked up choreography pretty quickly as a teenager, it was a lot harder to remember the steps when my brain was half on the dance and half on the fact that I needed to make dinner, do work, schedule stuff for the twins. Or maybe I was better as a teen about compartmentalizing and not worrying about schoolwork until it was time to worry about schoolwork.

Baby steps: I decided to learn one dance. One set of choreography per week. Not to push myself to learn more even if I had the time because one dance was sustainable. The class is off this week, so we’ll see if my new plan works next week. Who knows — maybe I’ll feel confident enough to go in person soon.

I saw a lot of people sharing this list of 40 pieces of work/life advice for a good reason: It’s good advice. Especially the first bit when it applies to work: Most decisions are reversible or have a brief shelf life if you choose. It is better to do something and get started because you may or may not waste time reaching your goal, whereas you will definitely waste time dithering on a decision.

And number three. Carolyn Hax always talks about how you can choose to see people in a neutral light rather than assuming ill-intent, and when you do, you realize how often someone’s decision is all about them and not about you at all. There was nothing you could have done to get a different response, and their decision says nothing about who you are.

And number fifteen. Especially re-reading your journal. That feels more like the point of the blog than people reading the words now. I love looking back at what I thought at other stages of life.

And thirty-nine. You can learn a lot about yourself and what you want/need by sitting with those uncomfortable reactions.

What spoke to you?

I am not a good photographer, and I don’t currently have a camera, but I love pictures, and I use my phone daily. I promised myself that I would learn some skills — how to better use the tool I have, how to frame the image, etc — between now and the end of summer. If you have advice (remember – I only have a phone as my camera), please pass it my way.

I’m starting with these 20 tips if you want to learn with me. I’ve set the video to start at the tips (about 11:15 minutes into it).

Just because it is the oldest request in the world, and we have been talking about this on blogs for at least 18 years and on bulletin boards before that (so… no… People magazine. This isn’t an original idea), it’s still worth talking about: separate waiting rooms at the OB/GYN for pregnant vs. non-pregnant patients.

I was trying to come up with other situations where separating people would be compassionate (as opposed to the pediatrician’s office, which separates sick kids from wellness visits to lessen the spread of germs), where the reason for the visit would be common enough that many people would be impacted daily vs. an individual situation.

Would it be equally awful to be shunted to a different waiting room? To watch some people go into one room and feel even more left out, knowing that this is your waiting room for the time being, with the desire to be in the other waiting room? In protecting people’s feelings, would we inadvertently create different, equally terrible ones?

Those were my thoughts over the last 18 years of thinking about this.