Time and patience

Allowing yourself time is one of life's most important lessons.

Learning to allow for your own timeline, to do things when YOU feel it's right and not feeling rushed by the undertones of society. Because sometimes you're not ready and sometimes you are but life isn't.

I don't know how I got into the head space of having nothing - everything was going so well but on that journey I lost myself. I was trying so hard to be someone else. Someone who fitted my version of the future and that collided with my version of reality. Somehow I lost touch.

I feel like I've now managed to reinvent myself. I was categorising myself as something that just hasn't happened yet. A mother-to-be, when I wasn't yet a mother-to-be. In wanting it so badly, in obsessing in my personal frustration, I ended up trying so hard to be someone I'm not.

Trying for a family isn't something to be taken for granted. I think until you hit that boulder you won't understand. I thought I did.

The hardship, the feelings of loss, the sadness, the hatred and anger you build towards your own body - as if it's constantly letting you down. The infinite power of the mind versus medication. The twists and turns and stumbles along the way. The constant ups and downs, the battles followed by heartache. The next cure, the next reason, the next diet, the next routine, all to find none work, because nothing works. The endless nights of research, the questioning, the discussions, the nights of endless tears and mornings of the same, not knowing if it's the sheer disappointment or the hormones but either way you just can't stop crying.

You go through your personal struggles with parents, who exclaim it was never a problem for them. You find distancing yourself from anyone with children the best solution. You find pregnant women everywhere, you find references to pregnancy in all TV shows and movies. You can't help it - it's like the feelings are following you and they're persistent. Friends openly ask if you're trying, colleagues insinuate you're sure to be next in the office, parents and grandparents brace themselves at every event for that special announcement.

My husband and I have probably had the hardest year of our lives and we've been together thirteen years, but not even married for one. This is when a husband and wife truly learn to trust, understand and be mindful of each other.

He has been amazing, in every sense, in every way he possibly could, and ultimately he's given me the space I needed to get my head around building myself a new version of the future. To build myself up to be something else - to shape a future without that, when in my mind my entire being rested on solely being that person for someone else and leaving ME at the door.

In my months of self-discovery I've found a few problems with myself.

1. I like to plan. I want my life to have a direction, a purpose and without that I'm a lost soul.
2. I'm a control freak - I need to maintain control at all times and occasionally, life just doesn't allow for that.
3. I don't like being an emotional wreck - I'd managed to build a pretty stable life for myself and this has disappeared beneath me.

I think it's pretty safe to say I still have a way to go and I don't know what the future holds. But I've had to build myself up to accept that what I thought was in my immediate future may not be and the direction I thought my life was about to take, may not be the way it works out. Women all over the world feel this, men all over the world feel the fall out of this and yet we don't talk about it. It's a point of discussion we rarely raise with our friends and family, but maybe if they knew, maybe if they had a clue, we wouldn't feel quite so helpless, quite so alone or frustrated. And maybe, just maybe they'd allow for our time to come, and in turn, so will we.