There were two back-to-back ideas that popped up for me in SuperBetter that both applied (at least, for me) directly to infertility.

Too Statements

The first was an exploration of “too” statements on page 189 – 190: “I’m too sad to go to dinner with my friends,” or “I’m too overwhelmed to figure out this insurance stuff,” or “I’m too scared to explore a different path out of infertility.”  It would be an interesting exercise to go through the journal I kept before the twins and count how many times the word “too” appears in the pages.

I still make a lot of “too” statements, and I like Jane McGonigal’s advice because she isn’t telling me not to make them.  Saying or thinking “too” statements is okay as long as you say the rest of her sentence.

All you have to do is say the first part and then tack on an “and” statement, pointing out that you have every personal reason not to do X but you’re going to do it anyway.

So it would become, “I’m too sad to go to dinner with my friends, and I’m going to go anyway and try not to look at Sarah’s enormous belly.”  Or “I’m too overwhelmed to figure out this insurance stuff, and I’m going to call the company and write everything down so I can figure out what is covered.”  Or “I’m too scared to explore a different path out of infertility and I’m going to get over that fear by spending time reading about a different option and seeing if it’s right for me.”

See, you still get to feel whatever you need to feel, but it doesn’t stop you from continuing to move forward through life.  Just a small tweak in how you phrase something to yourself, but it makes a big difference.  Try it.

Celebrating Your Friends

The second was something that is a sensitive topic in this community: being happy for someone else.  It is easy to be happy for others when you feel happy for yourself, but it is also a skill to help another person celebrate their “win.”

The book assumes that someone’s ally is in a mental space to celebrate and support another person, though what isn’t covered is when you are someone else’s support system because you are both trying to attain your goals, and someone reaches their goal first.  How do you engage in the active constructive responding on page 251 when one person has good news and the other person doesn’t?

I think active constructive responding — “taking someone’s good news or success and helping them really savour and celebrate it” — is difficult for a lot of people to do.  As this site, Go Strength, states, “When people share good news, they want you to share in their joy. And this goes far beyond just a pat on the back. Conveying authentic interest, pride, and even curiosity in someone’s good news are all hallmarks of ACR.”

So how do you shriek with happiness and get excited to see ultrasound photos?  Is this impossible to do when you’re in the throes of your own crisis?

Again, McGonigal has sound advice: ask three questions.  While she doesn’t address this particular situation — your ally is still drowning while you have reached shore — she does give a concrete way you can practice ACR without having to fake joy.  Ask three questions, any three questions.  Asking question shows interest.  It gives attention.  And it gives you a chance to repeat their answer, which shows that you’re listening AND lets them hear their own good news again, which is enjoyable.

And you?  You can make a “too” statement to yourself and add the “and” statement to get through the moment.  Maybe in getting through the moment, you feel real happiness for your friend, too, even if that happiness comes with an “and.”

What do you think of McGonigal’s advice?

I’m writing about SuperBetter the app as well as SuperBetter the book because… well… I learned about them via a podcast and now I want to talk about everything I’m learning on them. If you want to talk about them, too, join along. If not, skip the posts marked SuperBetter.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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There is a town in England that has a box of prophecies, kept in a secret location near the Panacea Museum.  That fact is just a small portion of a larger article about a ritual held at the museum last December, but I kept scrolling back and forth, trying to digest every morsel of information about this box.

How could they not open it?

Regardless of how you feel about the contents inside, whether you think they’re true or random blatherings, how could people continue to let time pass without reading the predictions?  What if we never declare the bishops in crisis and the box gets lost?  Or the box is opened hundreds of years from now and the contents have disintegrated?

Who is hiding the box?  And is there a contingency plan if something ever happens to that person?

Aren’t you curious about the contents of the box?  Would you want to know the prophecies?

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This is how I saw the information first: Trying to maintain too many friendships can affect your fertility according to a study out of Oxford University.  Robin Dunbar conducted the research, as in the Dunbar of Dunbar’s number fame that I’ve written about before.

But we haven’t gotten to the really interesting part.  There was one study that followed 30 teenagers, but publications presented the study in two very different ways.

The Guardian, for example, focused on the ways men and women maintain friendships:

Men need to meet up face-to-face and bond over activities, according to the study of students leaving home for the first time, while for female friendships, long phone conversations can bridge the physical distance.

Whereas the Mirror focused on a very different finding from the study: your fertility.  They even used the title to promise fertility to anyone who has five close friends (Women Can Boost Their Fertility “By Having a Core of Five Best Friends”).

Same study.  Same 30 teenager participants.  Same presentation of the research at a conference.  Two vastly different articles.

I only found one other article about the presentation that straddled both facets of the study: The Telegraph.  That publication started with the focus on how men and women maintain friendships and then continued with Dunbar’s statements on infertility.

(Yes, I’m aware that it sounds like he is emphatically blaming stress for all infertility, but let’s ignore that for a moment since I can’t find a transcript of the actual presentation.)

The idea of different outlets presenting the facts differently is nothing new; one only needs to turn on MSNBC and Fox News’s coverage of the same event to experience that.  But what I found interesting is that instead of assigning meaning to a single quote or action, the news sources chose to focus on two very different aspects of the same study, basically leaving out the other side’s point in their coverage.  In the Guardian’s world, infertility isn’t part of the study, and in the Mirror’s world, Dunbar wasn’t focusing on how men and women experience friendship.

The mainstream news sources solely presented or led with the information about friendships, and the tabloids clearly appealed to our fears by focusing on fertility.  At this point, the media coverage is infinitely more interesting than the study itself, but if anyone tracks down a copy of the transcript from the presentation, I’d love to read it.

File this under Take Everything with a Grain of Salt.

I bought myself Jackie so I could show it to the kids.  I really can’t put into words how much I loved this movie.  I cried through the whole thing, and I knew I wanted to own it the moment it came out on video.  Moreover, I wanted it as a digital copy so I could carry it with me wherever I went.

Some of it is the writing and the acting, but a lot of it is the space.  The West Wing gets some of the layout of the White House very wrong, and it annoys me whenever they walk through a door that doesn’t exist.  But this movie not only got the layout correct, but it makes me feel like I’m there.  Yes, we could watch a documentary on the White House and it would have the same effect, but this feels… different.  More emotional.

So I’m now carrying around Jackie in my pocket.  And four Harry Potter movies.  Because… you know… Potter.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Of Love and Rolling a Dosa” (Happiness and Food)
• “The Parents Who ‘Regret Having Children’” (Different Shores)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Riding the IVF Roller Coaster has a post that makes a great point: there is no formal declaration of best friendship in the way that you clearly know where you stand when it comes to marriage.  This means that I can consider someone my best friend, but maybe I’m not their best friend.  She writes: “However, why aren’t there rules about this? What about a ceremony to acknowledge who the best friend couples are? Why aren’t there rules to say if X is Y’s best friend, then it must be mutual and Y must be X’s best friend. I feel like a teenager who doesn’t know if she should refer to someone as her girlfriend.”  A really great question.

Bent Not Broken recalls a painful moment of someone springing an ultrasound video on her.  She thought she was going to get puppies doing cute tricks.  Instead she saw a baby wiggling around on the screen.  It’s a great post of how one person’s pleasure can be another person’s pain, and a good reminder to tread carefully, thinking through things before you click send or call someone over to see the “cutest thing ever.”

Anabegins has a post viewing your life in monthly (vs. daily) chunks.  She explains, “This past week I haven’t read or spent one on one time with anyone in my family. I may think I’m failing at my explicitly stated goals. But take a step back and look wider and the perspective is much different — this MONTH I’ve mediated 90% of days, had 3 one-on-one dates with each kid AND my husband, read 2 amazing books, and exercised 12 times.”  It’s a great reminder of looking at life goals in different ways to see the real story.

Lastly, No Baby Ruth is pregnant before IVF round 2, and I love her post because it captures the ups and downs of an early pregnancy.  Clearly someone out there has the early pregnancy experience that involves marveling over a positive pee stick and then running down the beach with the wind blowing in her hair and then happily shopping for baby clothes at six weeks (in other words, every pregnancy montage in a made-for-tv movie), but I do not know these people.  Pregnancy after infertility is hard, and because you know things so early, you go through the ups and downs of fear and reassurance.  Sending her good thoughts for smooth sailing from here on out.

The roundup to the Roundup: I now have Jackie in my hot little hands.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between February 17th and February 24th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I am still enjoying American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.  I don’t have any brilliant insights into how one goes about keeping someone close who holds divergent views from your own, but there have been a few moments where I’ve grabbed my notebook and jotted down something because it resonated with me.

One of these moments is early on in the book when she confronts someone who swindled a family member.  She slips between two houses to cry in private and have a conversation with herself.  Within moments, she is calm and collected, and she states: “Long ago, I had become my own confidante” (p. 138).

When she calls herself her own confidante, she’s not being facetious.  She talks to herself — in her head, but still addressing her feelings, answering questions, and giving comfort.  She is the advice giver she wishes she had outside her own brain, but she doesn’t stress the fact that some of her relationships are strained.  She is, after all, her own confidante.

I sat thinking about this idea for a long time because I am someone who likes to spend time with myself.  Sometimes I will joke about it when I’m going out with myself and sing a throaty version of “My Own Best Friend” from Chicago.  But while I’m out, am I really talking to myself?

The act of telling yourself something, as I often do on this blog, creates clarity.  It leads you to action or puts things in perspective.  Writing it down, putting it into words, matters.  And maybe THAT is the biggest loss of people not writing on their own blogs.  Yes, they are still throwing up small bon mots on Facebook or Twitter, but they’re not delving deep, telling themselves their own story.  In stepping away from that conversation with yourself, do you lose that role as trusted confidante of your own mind?

Do you tell yourself things, or do you just assume your brain already knows everything happening in your life?