What follows is an unusual post at a strange time because I experienced a little spike in new subscribers last week. Welcome, new friends. We will be back to our regularly scheduled programming sometime soon.
We are also taking one week off from the podcast and will be back on the 15th.
I’m lying on my bed with the blinds drawn. It’s four in the afternoon but I need to be in total darkness. The entire world around me feels like a loud, endless clang of metal on metal that rattles my bones. Eliminating as many senses as I can is the only way to get any relief.
Every afternoon, the shivers come, and even though I’m shaking from head to toe, it feels like my body has been blown into ten different pieces, each wholly disconnected from the other. Something huge and yet so small has been removed from inside me, and I worry that they took something of my self by accident. In a massive clench of every disconnected muscle, I feel phantom limb pain for the version of myself that didn’t know this diffuse yet cutting grief. I long for the innocence of the girl who got pregnant, who dutifully read new-agey books about the transition from “maiden to mother.” Here, in the wan light, blown apart, I’m neither. I’m a third thing. Forever changed by the cells that were inside of me and the hope that died with them. No rhyme or reason. One in five pregnancies ends this way. I just didn’t want mine to be one of them.