Poignant Paragraph

I picked up a copy of the Winter 2009 Resolve publication for the North East Region. Usually these pamphlets speak on a really top level, noobie level. I don't tend to find much that resonates for me anymore in these materials. I kind of feel like I've "read it all". But, surprisingly, a particular article jumped out at me, "Pregnancy Between Infertility Friends", by Anne F. Malave, PhD, p. 6.

This one paragraph really grabbed me on an emotional level (I hope they don't mind my including a paragraph here):

"The experience of infertility plunges people into contact with the outermost reaches of their humanity. Infertility is a profound crisis that threatens identity, relationships, and continuity. It threatens one's sense of the world, it disturbs beliefs and assumptions, and it belies safety and security. It is an emergency that uses up coping skills, and depletes resources; people start to run on empty as their chronic stress levels move into the area of trauma. Infertility can shut people down emotionally, it necessarily limits and narrows; people are functioning in "emergency mode", a black and white vantage point that oversimplifies for the purpose of survival. This is not the best place to understand the complexities of human interactions, or the perspective of the "other": this is a time to survive, and everything else may feel inessential, a luxury."

I don't think that there is any more clear way of expressing how infertility has made me feel. My beliefs and assumptions about getting pregnant, of being a mother, have been ripped to shreds. There have been times in cycles that NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. My eye is so "on the ball" that I turn totally inward, tunneling into doing everything to cycle.

That article expresses my innards so well. I can't read it without tears.