Hey everyone. I’m not always around these days but I read a post I wrote on Facebook from a year ago and thought some of you might appreciate it. I’d just wanted to express some thoughts. Facebook isn’t always the best place for that, in my experience, there’s little interest (although there is some) in infertility and loss, at least among my friends list. I just wanted to share this with anyone who’s struggling today. I have been there xx
• Memories. It’s true; the good ones hurt more than the bad ones do. But this won’t always be the case. One day those same memories will make you smile.
• Keep breathing. Keep putting one step in front of the other. Even if it takes real effort. In time it gets easier. That’s a promise. I’ve done this walk before.
• Guilt is just a part of the process. So is regret and feeling like you’re a failure or you’ve failed someone or something. Just because it’s normal to feel like this it doesn’t make it true.
• The scariest thought of all isn’t the thought of death itself; the death of anything, it’s the thought that what was there one minute can be gone in the next.
• Mentally beating yourself up won’t change anything. Similarly neither will mentally preparing yourself, it’s still going to hurt like hell.
• Other people probably won’t understand your pain, as much as you want them to, for them to know how much you’re hurting. The worst thing is not that people don’t understand, it’s that some simply don’t want to. Ignorance is bliss.
• Time definitely doesn’t heal all wounds but it does get more bearable, perhaps not day by day but week by week, month by month.
• You will survive. You will look back in time and reflect on how you did but you definitely will.
• Life will go on, though it may never feel the same again.
• You can think you’re all alone in the world because no one understands how you feel. You can be surrounded by family and friends and people who care and you can still feel alone. Always remember that someone loves you more than you will ever know. No matter how dark it is inside that place in your mind, in your heart, someone is outside waiting for you to come back out because they love you and because they miss you. Their existence depends on your being.
• People who love you hate to see you suffer. They want to take your pain away but they can’t. That won’t stop them from trying.
• You will laugh again.
• There is always, always someone worse off than you but life isn’t a competition as to who’s hurting the most.
• It’s always ok to cry. It’s ok to share. It’s ok to talk. Just don’t expect the answers you get to be the right ones. Sometimes they will be. More often they won’t be.
• Remember those that were there for you when you needed them the most, the same ones who are there for you when you aren’t in need of them. They’re always there. Remember them.
• There are those who might say to you “It was only a .....” but these people are wrong.
• There is never a good time for bad things to happen.
• Grieve your loss, whatever that may be, your own way and in your own time. You’re not doing it for anyone else.
• That thing you have lost will be all consuming to you at times. Like an addiction, you would sell your soul for just one more minute. But here’s the thing; one minute, one hour, week, month or year, it would never be enough. You can’t get back what is gone as much as you may want to.
• There’s an ocean of difference between sympathy and empathy. Sometimes people can’t empathise because they can’t imagine what you are going through.