The meaning of it all

I was interested to see that yesterday someone found this blog by searching on “ivf existential crisis”. I have used this phrase before but haven’t posted lately on the subject. And yet amid all the blood tests and the multi-vitamins this is very much what this experience comes down to for me. I am in a constant state of confusion about how I feel. And while I appreciate that no two people ever feel exactly the same, I suspect I am not the only one who struggles with the weight of not just the grief, anger, resentment and frustration that can come with the IVF territory, but also with the strangeness of what it means to be put in this position in the first place . When I think about this, combined with the fuzzy headed-ness brought on by the drugs, I want to congratulate us all for ever managing to leave the house.

If you read some of the professional literature around treating IVF patients, you will find our condition referred to as “a hidden disability”. I had realised for myself that my identity was uncertain in the face of infertility; it is still shocking to me that I can’t conceive. It still doesn’t seem to fit the image I have of myself. As many times it has been proven to me over the last few years, I still don’t feel like it’s real. Sometimes I still find myself baffled that I’m doing IVF. Me.

So I think the term “hidden” is important here. My infertility is hidden – through my choice – from most people in my life. I protect it from the curiosity and assumptions of people I don’t trust to understand. I also think society keeps the reality of infertility hidden from itself because, like me, it doesn’t know how to integrate it into the realms of normal experience. What could be less normal than the inability to reproduce? Our very existence depends on the fact that we can do so. On a very deep level, I think most people don’t know what to make of the reality of infertility.

So no wonder some of us feel existential angst. Our experience doesn’t make any sense. One of the most important parts of grieving is thought to be that ultimately some sort of meaning is made from what you go through. In some way, the traumatic event will come to make some kind of sense in your life. You will relinquish suffering and find acceptance. I haven’t found that place.

As I’ve mentioned before; I don’t feel like I can’t survive if I don’t have kids. On the contrary; part of my struggle has been to choose to even try. I’m caught between wondering if it’s really not meant to be – there’s something else I’m meant to be doing – and feeling like I have been deemed by some greater power to be unworthy, faulty. That my infertility is natural selection, because there is something fundamentally wrong with me that doesn’t belong in the gene pool.

Existential angst is borne of the struggle to find meaning in a meaningless world. I don’t feel I need children to discover the meaning of my life, but I do need to find the meaning of being required to think so carefully about the idea of having them at all.