Welcome Back to Me, My Brain Is a Mess

TW: Pregnancy Loss (some studies suggest trigger warnings aren’t helpful, but I personally find them helpful, so I’ll be trying to remember to use them)

Hi everyone! It’s been 8 months and 2 days. I used to apologize for “long” absences without posts, but I never could have predicted an absence as long as this.

I’m still here, but a lot has changed. Or nothing has. Most importantly, three things:

1. I was 25 weeks pregnant.
2. I am not pregnant anymore.
3. I do not have a living baby.

I haven’t posted on this blog because back in November, December, January, and February, being pregnant was the biggest thing in my life, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post about it. Then in March, we lost our daughter, and I certainly wasn’t sure if I wanted to post about that. I am still not sure. And I will not be sharing the story here now. So if you’re here because you want to rubberneck a disaster, I invite you to text me because I am, in fact, a hot mess. But if you’re here now on the blog because you want to read about my hospitalization and the downfall of my hopes and dreams, you won’t find it here.

That’s another reason I haven’t posted. Because if I’m completely honest, my life is not fun right now. I started this blog to document my life though, and this is my life. That is just honest. So, I decided two things:

1. This blog is about me, and I can write whatever the heck I want.
2. If you don’t want to see it, you don’t have to read it.

You may be wondering, if I’m not telling the story of the loss, what will I even say? Well, I have a lot of thoughts. I should warn you in advance, these thoughts are not well-planned or logical in their order. That’s because my brain is currently not well-planned or logical in any order. I feel like one of the “secondary losses” that people don’t talk about much is the loss of orderly thoughts. I used to be a big planner. Type A. Set schedule. I had a weekly reminder in my calendar to send out my blog newsletter. As a great example, I STILL have a weekly reminder to send out my blog newsletter. It went off yesterday. It goes off every week and every week I ignore it. But I haven’t deleted it! Everything in my brain now is in shambles and I just wake up every day like an adventure. Who knows what will happen or when or why or how? I certainly didn’t expect or plan for THIS to happen, so why expect or plan for anything? If you were wondering if this makes work and my professional life complicated, it does. Keeping track of tasks is a lot more complicated than it used to be and I need lots of technological aids.

Anyway, as you can see from that previous paragraph, expect some rambling. It’s a struggle. If you’re surprised that I decided to come back to the blog even though I can’t form cohesive thoughts, I’m surprised, too. But last night I had this strong urge to write about something and I couldn’t quiet it. I started the blog because I loved to write, and that is still true. I’ve been writing this whole time in a never-to-be-published blog and in a journal. But there’s something different about putting thoughts into the world for people to see. The possibility of having someone else read my craziest thoughts and relating to it gives me hope and purpose.

Personally, throughout the past few months, I have so appreciated the podcasts and Instagram accounts and Facebook groups of people dealing the same struggles as me. It’s terrifying to see how common it is, but it’s also extremely heartwarming to know I’m not alone. Sometimes I don’t want to see them and I put things on mute, but sometimes they are the only things that make this feel bearable. If a community holds a loss together, they collectively can carry more. Those are two more of the reasons I decided to come back to the blog: to find community and to bring people into my new (and often depressing) reality.

More coming soon.

♥ ,

Emily