This last year has been defined by two themes: isolation and community.
How the heck those two themes go together? I don’t know, but let me try to explain.
I learned in the hardest way imaginable this year that I have been a burden to my friends. I don’t say that lightly to to illicit sympathy. I say it because it’s true.
Going through infertility is the single most traumatic thing that has happened to me in my life and I don’t say that lightly, having lost a loved one to the opioid crisis and having lived through a couple of very traumatic, narcissistic, abusive, relationships.
What I learned in the course of navigating through infertility is that unless you are confiding in someone who has walked through your path, it is not worth trying to explain what you are going through because they can never (and will never) understand.
It took loosing someone who I thought would be by my side forever to learn this the hard way.
I was a burden to my friend. I overshared this very traumatic thing that was happening to me. I vocalized my overwhelming fears in confidence and I overspent my “grief piggybank.” All the while, this friend was walking through their own journey and I was too blinded by my struggles to even notice it. I was not a good friend. I had caused hurt while I was hurting and they no longer wanted to be my friend.
And, as much as it hurt at the time (and frankly, as much as it hurts now), I am glad that it happened. It needed to happen.
Grief is messy.
When I was confronted with the stark reality of how I had hurt others in my grief and how the weight of my grief was too heavy for my friends to share with me, it forced me to confront the reality that I was on my own.
I had two options: live in this horrible thing that had happened to me; or start to get better.
I decided that it was time to start getting better. The emotional side to my grief had, at that point, manifested itself physically. Add to that, my body feeling all but broken in recovering from the physical pain of my egg retrieval surgery and the subsequent complication that hyperstimulation syndrome posed to my recovery. In a weird way, the physical pain was cathartic. My body was feeling had felt like a trapped scream in my heart for almost 2 years.
Good friends of ours invited us up to their new home in Austin, TX, for some spiritual and physical R&R. Our time in TX was short, but significant. Unbeknownst to us, they had curated a weekend of spiritual rest and physical activity that gave us the necessary boost that we needed to start to move forward. Spiritual rest came in the form of deep conversations that exposed our hurt and anger towards God and those friends and family that walked away from us; it also came with our faces down in an alter encountering the holy spirit like never before. They also coordinated a hike in a state park where I carried my 30+lb foster son on my back for close to 4 hours. As crazy as it sounds, that hike whipped my body back into shape and I started to turn the corner and recover from my hyperstimulation syndrome.
When we got back home, the realities of my uncertain life hit me like a ton of bricks, but I was determined to move forward.
During our trip to TX, God made it very clear that in order to move forward, I was going to have to sever this idea that my friends could help shoulder the burden. It was time for me to carry the weight of my assignment on my own. Simultaneously, he reminded me that I am the product of community and that I needed to step out in faith, be vulnerable, start over at my new church, and get plugged in. And, so I did.
March through May of 2023 was somehow both the loneliest time in my life, and yet the fullest.
When things came up (and trust me, they did), I had to physically pivot and put my needs in the hands of Jesus. It was just me and God like the old days again, and it was beautiful.
At the same time, he put me in a room with 8 incredible women at my new church who were the exact people that I needed in that season. The women who walked me through my foster son’s surgery, embryo loss, and betrayal.
Seasons of isolation and community can truly co-exist.
Since that difficult lesson, I have become a softer person. I was telling my therapist the other day that I am so grateful that I have known grief and that grief has become a part of my DNA. I would never want to take back this experience as it has taught me an empathy that I didn’t know I was capable to demonstrating, and has opened my mind, heart, and arms to things I never thought that I was capable of doing.
Moreover, since that time, with the love and direction that only God can provide (and with the help of my therapist), I have been able to work through forgiving people (including myself and God), and situations that I had been harboring so much anger towards. I have built and enforced boundaries.
I stopped laying my burdens on my friends and have laid them where they belong – at the feet of Jesus.
I am not the same person that I was a year ago. I have been decidedly marked by grief and have learned to embrace all of the beautifully broken ways that God has redeemed (and will continue to redeem) that grief in this season.
The Lady Esquire 