Nothing Is Infinite

On the bridge between who I was, what I've let go, and who I am becoming.

“Everyone who terrifies you is 65% water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust,
and I know
sometimes
you can’t even breathe deeply,
and the night sky is no home,
and you have cried yourself to sleep
enough times that you are down to your last two percent,
but
nothing is infinite,
not even loss.
You are made of the sea and the stars,
and one day
you are going to find yourself again.”

-Finn Butler

All I want to do with my life is put band aids on the world.

Yes, I understand this is both profound and ridiculous, just like enduring IVF treatments like a warriors marathon AND a clown car of medications, seeking out ketamine treatments as a choice that wasn’t really a choice (so much more on that below if you’re paying attention), or my desire to go outside and run for miles, pounding my feet against the pavement on days that I can hardly even walk out of the house.

I’ve lived so much of my life in that space where profound and ridiculous crash into each other like waves - messy, uninvited, but somehow illuminating that it feels familiar. It feels like home. And wanting to put Band-Aids on the world is such a perfect metaphor - something I’ve done and tried to learn how to do at the same time, how to hold the bleeding, how to name it, how to keep showing up for it.

I kept showing up.

Even when it meant grieving while giggling.

Even when my strength looked like a hospital gown and my power looked like tears on a therapists couch. Even when the “choice” didn’t feel like one at all. I am, without a doubt, the kind of person who wants to put Band-Aids on the world. Even if all I have left are sparkly ones. Especially if all I have left are sparkly ones.

Honestly, it’s kind of ridiculous.

Ridiculous like giving yourself injections in a public restroom stall while praying you mixed the meds right. Ridiculous like choosing to go through IVF again knowing the percentages haven’t shifted in your favor, but your heart keeps whispering what if.

Ridiculous like signing up for IV Ketamine because the alternative was… not making it to 2025. Sitting in a recliner, headphones on, my brain swirling into places I wasn’t sure I could survive. And still choosing to go back. Again. And again. And again.

What’s ridiculous is that none of this was actually optional.
Not infertility.
Not postpartum depression.
Not losing babies. Not losing myself.

But the choices inside of those experiences?
The ones that kept me here?
Those were profoundly human. And profoundly me.

Like deciding that grief doesn’t mean I have to stop finding joy in magic necklaces and new Lego set builds and Wednesday Addams dolls. Like learning to say “I’m not okay” out loud, even when the whole world tells you to whisper that part. Like becoming a doula, a guide for others walking through their own ridiculous, impossible, breathtaking pain, and then leaving it all behind when my own pain became too much to bear.

Sometimes I think healing is less about fixing and more about bearing witness.

To our own stuff. To each other’s. To the mess and the miracles and the moments in between.

I don’t always want to keep choosing this life. But I do. And I will.

Because somehow, in between the losses and the needles and the heartbreak and the therapy sessions,
I found the most tender truth.

Even when I feel wrung out and war-torn,
I am still the girl with the sparkly Band-Aids.
Still trying to patch up the world.
Still believing there’s something worth saving here.

Still trying to create something that my daughter will be proud of. Still trying to write something I can release into the unknown, believing that my life had the ability to change the worst parts for others.

The poem above by Finn Butler speaks deeply to a new part of me.

A part of me that has been rescued but not yet recovered, a part of me that is being rediscovered, but hasn’t been yet been rewritten. I feel like I am sitting in the middle of a dark room, eyes closed, white noise in the background, comforted by the soothing sound of another quite voice alongside my own incredibly wise stream of consciousness, cracked wide open, quiet and completely vulnerable. In those moments, in the time I was transported to another place entirely, there was the most space for that version of me - the one that was rescued and being rediscovered, to authentically, honestly become.

My becoming came with a lot of words - some that mattered, some that were extra, and some that changed everything. It came with notes. With exhales. With big tears. With silent screams. Complete with somatic experiences I’ll perhaps one day choose to detail. In retrospect, that’s what was happening in that dark room, after the medicine, when I was nearly a hundred percent open and honest and curious and observational and unafraid (or afraid, and doing it anyway). I became.

One day, you are going to find yourself again.

Last year, I thought this would be impossible. And its true, the version of myself I’ve found is only partially made up of who I used to be. But we can’t stay who we are when life changes everything we know, everything we see, everything we’ve ever believed. It’s fundamentally impossible. We have to release. We have to recreate. We have to sew together the strings of what was with what is and what could be. We have to integrate what we knew with what we’ve learned and allow space for that to change and grow with or without intention.

I understand that some days, these feelings cause me deep and definite heartbreak, and I understand that I’ve also spent the last six months learning to shift my mentality - not just to better myself, or to identify and digest my own trauma, my own heartbreak, my own moments of fear and doubt, the moments that prevented me from breathing, the ones that lied to me, the ones that made me unsure if I could keep going; but to scale down the scope of what and how much I’m feeling in any given moment that is completely outside of my control.

This, friends, is {pardon my French} a big f-ing deal.

In reality, I can’t put band aids on the world. It takes too much out of me.

I didn’t know how to see this before. I couldn’t even recognize it. I just worried - about everyone and everything all of the time. I thought that was normal. I thought that’s what everyone did. I could never understand why other people weren’t as mentally exhausted as I was constantly. And then my eyes were opened to the perspective at 30,000 feet. The bandaids I wanted so badly to put on the world - they were keeping my empathy on fire. They were burning me down. They were sacrificing what I had remaining for my life. For my daughter. For my husband. For my career. For my body to function. For me to stay alive.

Yes. I’m serious. I’ve just recently come to understand this all.

In that vain, I’ve stopped consuming so much media. I don’t watch the news. I don’t even watch the shows that recap or highlight current events. I’ve curated the accounts I follow on social media and what I allow to enter my social feeds, protecting myself from seeing the things I know will aggressively yank on my heart strings and break my mental clarity. This discretion of intake has not only been advised, but incredibly intentional - allowing me to scroll without feeling the weight of this world crushing my heart, making it feel hard to breathe, forcing me to focus only on the dismay and doom that seems to be so prevalent across the world.

And then I come here - to write, to process, full of thoughts and questions and puzzle pieces, looking not for the glue to fit them together, but trying to buy myself the patience and the time to find the rightful spot for each one, interlinking it with it’s neighbors, its friends, the pieces that came before it and the ones that undoubtedly will come after it.

I come here to find and practice empowerment - the biggest goal I unintentionally have set out to establish as I re-write the newest version of myself. And sometimes, there are moments or events or things or people who make that feeling inaccessible to me. It doesn’t mean I’m not longer empowered. Or that I’ve taken steps backwards in my recovery. It means that I can’t reach that feeling because something is standing in the way.

And thats when I stop.

It’s when I know I need to return to the drawing board, to the medicine, to the keyboard, and work to find my way back in. It’s when I look for the door to enter empowerment again, navigating back through the thing that left me feeling small or anxious or uncomfortable or foreign.

In many ways, this process is still new to me. It’s still incredibly challenging, and it still leaves me feeling vulnerable and exposed. But it also makes me feel alive, and attuned, and confident, and strong, and brave - when I let it. It let’s me feel like I’ve put a Band-Aid on myself, and maybe even some on the people standing closest to me, and that those Band-Aids are enough to triage the rest of the damage in the interim, and to figure out how to sit down, how to exhale, how to separate myself, and how to find the familiar feeling again - like any version of me from across the space time continuum, whether at 4 or 8 or 15 or 21, and I think today, I can be okay with that.

As I’m trying to find the continual grace to navigate this process, the ebbs and the flows, the highs and the lows, I am slowly trying to become slightly more patient - if not with myself, than with the process that has gotten me here - because if nothing else, I know I believe in that. I know, because look up at what I have written, at what I have shared with you today….

& I clearly believe in the process, because I am becoming.

& to be honest, thus far, I’m pretty happy with what I’m seeing as the current result.