To most of my friends, I am the “strong friend.” I am the one people come to when they need a shoulder, ear, or someone to help them work through their problems. I wasn’t used to being in a position of vulnerability, so I wasn’t comfortable being in the position.
This led to me internalizing A LOT. It felt like everyone needed me to be okay and because I am a people pleaser, I gave them what they wanted. Or the illusion of what they wanted. I smiled, engaged, and quoted things I’d read on the internet. All the while, I was dying. Struggling with jealously, resentment, and self-worth. I felt like a waste of a woman. There is this thing that is supposed to be natural for women. I watched so many women get the happy ending I felt I deserved.
My marriage took one of the biggest hits, and thus the fallout of my infertility began.
I felt like I needed to let my wife go and be with someone who could give her a family. I convinced myself that she was staying with me out of pity and that I was stealing something from her. She tried over and over to tell me that it was always me. Her life was always with me and whatever came with that was a bonus, but I could not see it. I started to fixate on my physical appearance. I had gained weight/struggled with weight over the years, big thanks to PCOS, and when I started IVF, the medications and pregnancies exacerbated it.
It became a self-pity party. It consumed my thoughts leaving little space for much else. My wife was so worried about making sure that I was okay that it didn’t leave space for her to properly heal from her traumatic experience. In my own grief, I couldn’t even begin to see it. My body was the one that it happened to, but she had to watch all of it. She had to watch our sleeping boys coming into this world all while watching my life hang in the balance. Sometimes I still can’t even fathom her strength.
After obsessing over what my body could not do, I took a turn to pouring into what it could do. I decided I was going to pour everything I had into changing my physical appearance. I was convinced that if I could just lose weight and feel better, everything would be okay. I spent the next year pouring into my health and lifestyle. It worked. After all the times of trying and failing, I did it. I ended up losing 120 pounds and was in the best physical shape since being a child in sports. People were amazed and showered me with compliments that should have made me feel on top of the world, but they didn’t.
No matter much I changed on the outside, it didn’t matter because what I felt on the inside reigned supreme. Not only did I still not feel worthy of womanhood, but I was also still struggling with feelings of holding my wife back from her dreams of children and continuing to give into self-sabotaging behaviors. What I thought was going to make me happy, didn’t. The whole time I thought I was healing; I was just giving myself a whole new set of issues.
To be continued…
