Me, Instagram, and Infertility.

And some words about living in the tension of joy and sorrow.

In January, I deleted the Instagram app from my phone. Why? Because I was (am?) addicted. Yes, I said it. That app has ruined my brain cells (and many productive, self-care habits), and I’m here admitting it to the world.

One afternoon, I was reading a post that irritated me. I felt fiery! Emmy came to tap on my leg and ask me to play. It was a workday for me, so she’d been gone from me all day, and I knew she needed me to attune and connect with her. But instead, I snapped. I told her to go play, got back to reading the dumb post full of misinformation, and then got even more dysregulated when it dawned on me that I was presently missing out on what matters to me more than anything else in this world - being present and emotionally connected to my kid. As soon as I realized what was happening internally (and externally), I instantly thought: this app has got to go - STAT!

If you’ve followed me for any period of time, you know that my ghosting on Instagram is a pattern. I get into a good groove posting content, and then I crash. I get flooded, over-stimulated, and start questioning why I’m using it at all. I doubt its usefulness for career building quests, get all flippy-floppy, and then I peace out. Which is exactly what I did before my swift exit this time. I even made a post that was all, “Here’s what I’m posting about in 2025”, with a desire to use my medium-sized platform to educate on mental health-related topics beyond just eating disorders, and then days later, I decided BYE and deleted the app from my phone. This time, though, I’m sincerely, sincerely, considering a FOR REAL exit. I’m just not convinced that I need to have some sort of professional presence on social media to be successful in the way I am currently defining professional success. So, stay tuned, I guess (because if you know me, I really might change my mind).

A part of my exit was also driven by the need to truly get back to some rhythms and routines that truly anchor me in my values. While Instagram gives me dopamine (hooray!)…it doesn’t actually ground me. Because if I’m being honest with you, my life has felt like a bit of a dumpster fire, and in many ways, I have felt very not grounded. There is so much joy - Emmy’s little temperament is wildly joy-filled, and it’s the greatest grace to witness her spirit. And there is so much mess. And grief. There is a lot of that.

We don’t talk about grief enough. Partly because we’ve been socially conditioned to exclusively associate grief with death, but also because we’ve been socially conditioned to avoid and minimize our pain or “negative emotions” in the name of “grit” or “resilience,” and sometimes even in the name of faith. We compare our struggles to others who “have it worse” or force ourselves to “look on the bright side” so we can escape the depths of our despair, anguish, and disappointment because (usually subconsciously) we believe that if we face it, it could swallow us whole or make us “ungrateful” for our gifts. Childhood wounds also play a big role in how we respond to and interact with our emotions as adults. We tend to instinctively treat our emotions the way that our emotions were treated as children. So, if our big emotions were met with hostility, judgment, and punishment, and if we didn’t have space to express emotions in the presence of an empathic, emotionally attuned and mature witness (i.e.: our parents), we simply carry on and reinact that same pattern because it’s all we know how to do. (*p.s., therapy can be really helpful for rewiring this stuff).

I digress (no one is shocked). Back to the topic of grief.

We’ve been trying to grow our family for a year and a half, and the months of periods and negative pregnancy tests simply keep ticking. Last April - almost a year ago now - I experienced a chemical pregnancy (a really cold term for an early miscarriage). This January, we met with a fertility specialist and began test after test after test to try to (finally) get some answers. Earlier this month, on the morning we got our final test results back and a message from our doctor confirming that IUI or IVF will be a part of our journey, my husband was laid off from his job with very little severance. Add in a very unexpected trip to the ER that same week - on account of an infection from an EYE STYE (of all things) - and you get the picture: dumpster fire.

Getting pregnant with Emmy took us longer than we wanted, longer than “normal”, but I never imagined that this is where we’d be.

I was never the girl who dreamed of being a mom. I had those friends in college, and it wasn’t me. I knew I always wanted kids. My love for them and curiosity for all things child development is what led me to study early childhood education and then go on to teach elementary school for a few years before shifting gears within the human development space and becoming a therapist. But becoming a mother to Emmy has massively reorganized my values, and mothering littles is the deepest desire of my heart. It’s not just that I get to implement what I’ve studied for years during multiple master’s programs with my own tribe - that part is really cool. It’s this sense of home and meaning that I literally feel in my body when I’m mothering: it’s hard to put a finger on it, but it delights me and nourishes me in a way that nothing else on this planet does.

And so, I am angry.

Infertility sucks really bad. It’s deeply unfair, and there is so much grief in the process that no one talks about. And I like talking about things that people don’t like to talk about or simply shove under some metaphorical rug. So buckle up. Here’s what infertility is like, at least for me.

It’s the emotional roller coaster of hope and devastation, month after month, the ever-widening age gap that I didn’t want, and the physical experience of literal loss every 20-something days. It’s the myriad of ways I try to tell myself “just don’t have hope this month, expect a period, it’ll be easier this way” so I can have just a TINY reprieve from the pain of it all even though I know I’m lying because there’s a part of me that can’t not hope even just a little, even though I know it never really eases the blow. It’s the comments from well-meaning people asking about when we’ll have another one, and the literal pit in my stomach and the stinging in my eyes that I feel when I utter the words, “I want that more than you know” and “we’ve been trying for a long time for that.” It’s the peeing on strips - I’m so sick of strips - and the temptation to want to blame my body as the problem when I’ve worked so hard in my therapy (yes, therapists have therapists and had therapists) to befriend it. It’s the loneliness - gosh, it’s so lonely. It’s the ticking clock with my “advanced maternal age” being a stone’s throw away, and the well-intentioned but massively invalidating comments from kind but emotionally immature adults reminding me “not to stress” and that “it will happen when it should.” It’s the uncertainty of it all, the loss of what I’d imagined our family would be. It’s the financial burden of fertility treatment in an already financially uncertain time. It’s staring at that maternity clothes bin in the spare closet, hoping that one day, I’ll get to pull that out again, and putting Emmy’s clothes away that she’s outgrown (again), and wondering if I’ll get to reuse them like I’ve prayed I would.

It’s constantly being surrounded by women who had babies so effortlessly, and thinking to yourself, “You have no idea how lucky you are.” It’s begging God day after day to be near, to show me His presence amid what feels mostly incomprehensible. It’s sometimes trying to diminish how bad you want another baby just to quell the pain of it all. And now since we’ve started IUI, it’s the hormones, the mood swings (thanks, hormones), the shots, the pills, the waiting, and the deep fear and sadness that just sort of sits next to me everyday, the uncertainty about whether this will work, and the stress of what it would mean if it doesn’t. And currently, it’s having to pause fertility treatment after our first failed round of IUI on account of my husband getting shingles. I’m telling you, 2025 has been a year.

I spend a lot of time in my job reminding people of the “both/and’s”, the dialectics of life. I find myself sharing with clients how different parts of us can feel totally polarized emotions and have contradicting thoughts about things, and how that doesn’t mean we all have a personality disorder but rather points to the reality that we are complex, messy beings able to feel so many feelings in brief moments of time. This reality can create a lot of dissonance, especially if you tend to see experiences (or emotions or thoughts) through a black and white lens. But emotional maturity means holding space for our sorrow and our gratitude without diminishing either.

While we navigate a season of our lives that is full of grief and longing, I am anchored by the truth that I do not journey alone in this suffering, that Jesus is my compassionate companion who weeps beside me and with me. My spiritual director reminded me recently, “God longs for authentic expression of emotion, Rachel.” And not only that, as she so gently reminded me, He longs to hold it, to contain every honest and raw and unfiltered expression of emotion that at one point in my faith journey I might have labeled unholy or simply spiritually bypassed. But as KJ Ramsey reminds me in her beautiful book, “The Lord is my Courage”, faith is not a kite. It is not, she writes, “…truth that liberates and lifts us above the weary world. We’re discipled to tie up our painful emotions with a string to the kite of Christ’s resurrection, as though the string could sail us on the wind over this world’s weaknesses, rising high into a cloudless sky, until our problems are out of sight. Faith is not a kite. It’s a long walk on a dark night.” (**If you’re interested in emotionally healthy Christianity, this book is a required reading, FYI.)

Lately, I feel seen in the words of Stefanie Duncan Smith, who writes, “I’m starting to think this way about authentic resilience: not checking out of your life, or even powering through, but practicing the learned skill of staying in the tension, where deeper muscles are activated. It takes a certain kind of soul stamina to accept that joy and sorrow belong to each other just as the salt belongs to the sea. And so we find our resilience in holding these seemingly disparate realities and making our peace with the paradox by trusting it is all seen by God. We find our resilience in the soul-stretching acceptance of reality as it is, and the active resistance of toxic positivity as well as the defeatism of despair.” (*Link to her book here).

In every sense of the word, I have been eagerly awaiting Spring. And as I wait and yearn for what is not yet, even as I acknowledge that our Wintering may continue to last longer than I would ever choose, my prayer is that I will remain present, in this tension, even when there are parts of me that don’t want to. In fact, the song Centering Prayer by The Porters Gate (and the spiritual practice of Centering in general) has been a lifeline in this season. You can listen to the song for the full lyrics (and perhaps it might encourage you the way it has me), but these words have been such a deep comfort and a loving reminder of what is true.

I want to be where my feet are

I want to breathe the life around me

I want to listen as my heart beats

Right on time…

I want to be where my feet are

I chase my worries

I flee my sorrows

But what you give me

Is now

So take my burdens

And my tomorrows:

I want to be where my feet are

Here’s to staying present in the tension, resisting the urge to minimize what hurts while digging our heels firmly into the soil of hope and gazing still at beautiful things.

With love,

Rachel