Hold my Hand, Hold your Breath.

& I'll find a place to land, where you're safe, never break, where the morning never ends...

If you're alive
Then it means that you're committed to survive
That's enough to drain the life from you sometimes
But I'll hold on tight

I mean, can we first exhale at the dynamic power and heartbreaking reality of these words?

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve walked into therapy and I’ve either played this song or re-iterated the lyrics above because I needed to express how it felt to stay here, fighting for something I at times can’t even force myself to want. It actually seems like this has been my anthem, or the bane of my existence (both/and) for the better part of the last three years; more in some seasons than others, but there in the background none the less.

If you’re alive, then it means that you’re committed to survive

Hello. Hi. This is the hardest truth I’ve ever had to learn {the hardest truth I’m currently learning}. Sometimes frankly it feels like bullshit and I want to scratch out the words and forget I ever read them.

Now, if you had asked me about this in a different chapter of my life, at a different age or in a different stage, I likely would not have related to this song in the way that I do today.

Because although I’ve stumbled through trauma and loss for most of my life, the schism of before and after happened on August 4, 2021. That’s when surviving on its own started to seem like the most difficult task in the world.

Staying on earth, alive, with my feet firmly planted on the ground put me in a category I had no desire to ever comprehend - I became a mother with one child on earth and two in heaven. Losing the twins, watching Noahs heart stop beating as I held him in my hands - it’s not a normal thing to survive. Honestly, in the early days, I was angry that I had in fact survived it. Because when you lose someone you love, when you lose your child, your world screeches to a halt… but the rest of the world keeps moving. Life keeps going. And at some point, you have no choice but to reintegrate into the life you were living, even with this gigantic hole in your heart that you know will never ever be able to close.

It’s kind of like it’s enough to drain the life from you sometimes.

What an impossibly honest way to say that wanting to leave and needing to stay both exist as “options” for us all, and even when logically we know what we’d choose, what we should choose, this goes way beyond logic.

It goes to the depths of the soul. Or my soul, anyway.

Who am I if I’m surviving, but the life has been drained out of me? A shell? A vessel? A way for my brain to keep going by staying inside the body that betrayed me, that held death inside of it, that threatened to take me with it?

You can't help when your stomach sinks
See your life happen in a flash (hey)
In your head, it could be so real
That you almost feel the crash (oh)
The panic is temporary
But I'll be permanent
So when it hits, don't forget
As scary as it gets
It's just turbulence

I worked really really really hard to navigate the deaths of Noah and Victoria, and I felt like I was finding footing again as a person, a partner, a mother, a colleague, and a friend, and then, I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance four months ago because I was experiencing intense internal bleeding due to a spontaneous, surprise pregnancy - one that implanted in my fallopian tube instead of my uterus, and one that i lost - the baby, the tube, the blood, and, well, myself.

I’ve been a different person since then.

Learning I was pregnant from ER bloodwork, rather than a pregnancy test or a beta HCG draw at the fertility clinic was heartbreaking. It was a situation I never could’ve imagined.

This loss was different.

This experience was different.

This outcome, although similar, was different.

This NEED for emergency surgery was different.

Every moment of that experience is so deeply ingrained in my head that I can’t forget it, I can’t make it go away, and I can’t ever pretend that it’s not permanent.

My stomach sank. Rowan’s life happened in a flash.

In my head, the insurmountable trauma was in fact real. I felt the crash. & worse - the panic turned out not to be temporary.

The turbulence turned my life upside down and inside out, and in the last four months I’ve been unable to find my way back to who I was then, to who I tried to be, to how much changed without my even knowing. I think about the ways my subconscious tried to warn me, just like it did the week before losing the twins, but I wasn’t paying enough attention. I just kept going, kept putting one foot in front other other, until eventually I was lying on my bedroom floor and couldn’t get up on my own.

Being committed to surviving this, not just the loss of a third baby, but of the numerous health issues I’ve faced amongst these losses in the last three years (three relatively urgent or emergent surgeries, several new diagnoses, countless medication trials, cumulative months spent in the hospital, more than a year of having a needle stuck in my chest, ending up with broken bones time after time after time, five months of bacterial meningitis, an abscess in my brain, a migraine lasting 14 weeks, fighting to navigate it all through therapy and psychiatric medication and intensive medical and psychological care) - it’s been…. unfathomable. It’s been a cascade of compounding trauma, over and over and over again.

I’d be lying if I told you here that it just feels like turbulence.

It feels actually like I’m living inside a ticking time bomb, waiting for it to explode at any time - and here’s the honest to gosh truth. It’s fine. I’ll be fine when it does. I’ll have known it was coming, even if I hadn’t articulated it.

It’s the other people in my life, the people I love and cherish, the little light I brought into this world, my partner, my innermost circle - those are the people that would be most effected.

Which is honestly the true reason that I’m still committed to survive. If this were just me we were talking about, these lyrics might hit different. This plan or lack of plan or conversation about a plan - it would be null, because staying or going - it would be my decision and my decision alone.

Hold my hand
Hold your breath
And I'll find a place to land
Where you're safe
Never break
Where the morning never ends
When you say that you can't
I will watch you dance
Through this turbulence
This turbulence

-P!nk

::Turbulence::

Yesterday during my medication infusion, my dose was increased quite a bit, and I had a more traditional experience - the kind I’d basically been expecting since I started it last week. During this session, I remember walking through a non paved pathway beside someone, watching as all of these different images passed us on either side. I have no clear visual of what it was that was passing by, if they were moments that have happened or moments yet to come, if they were people I already knew or ones that would find their way to me soon, and I have no idea with whom I was walking.

I just know that I felt safe. I felt like if I needed to reach out, there would be a hand to grab. There would be someone to find me a safe place to land.

This is what I’m walking away with today - turbulence is not meant to be faced alone. And no matter how hard it continues to be to ask for help or support or a hand to grab or an ear to listen to the most difficult, intimate, vulnerable thoughts, it can and will exist if I try hard enough to find it.

[ASO to those of you who have stood beside me for the last several months and have helped me immensely even make it to this point that im standing in right now. Without each of you, I have no idea where, or if, I’d be.]