Finding Community Amidst Your Fertility Journey

“I promise you, there is something worse out there than being sad. And that is being alone and being sad. Ain’t nobody in this room alone.” – Ted Lasso

Later this month we will observe Infertility Awareness Week, so I want to take a moment to speak to those of you who are experiencing difficulties in your journey towards becoming parents. I know it can be one of the most lonely experiences. When you or your partner gets pregnant, everyone wants to talk to you and shower you with gifts. When you are struggling to conceive, nobody knows what to say. Or worse, they say things that minimize and invalidate your pain.

There are as many ways of experiencing infertility as there are people. Trying to conceive in any manner without success, needing medical intervention to conceive, secondary infertility, pregnancy loss, and needing to pursue alternative routes to parenthood are just some of the experiences we might have, and they may hold different kinds of pain for each of us. I think this is another reason it can feel isolating—even within the infertility community, everyone’s story is so different.

However, I want you to consider for a minute that imperfect community may be better than no community at all.

In my work as a therapist, I support people going through this whole range of infertility experiences, and I see over and over again that the absence or presence of authentically supportive relationships plays a critical role in how we get through it. No, nobody will understand perfectly. But there are people who can understand parts of your experience, people who are willing to witness and walk with you through the parts that they can’t understand, and people who aren’t going to just try to fix what can’t be fixed.

Community doesn’t fix it. It won’t give you a baby. But from what we know about trauma, it’s not just the hard thing that you go through that causes trauma. It’s also whether or not you feel supported and connected to other humans while you’re going through it.

So that’s what I want to encourage you to find. Get connected to a group (Flourish just started a new one!), start seeing a therapist who specializes in this (there are a bunch of us here), take a step towards some kind of community. You might not have control over what you’re going through, but you don’t have to go through it alone.