Human Resilience

“I’m not going to spend this first entry walking you through the physical details of what today was like. Instead, I want to talk about something that had been turning over in my mind for months. Something that I think we, as a society, have gotten deeply, stubbornly, expensively wrong.

Let’s talk about the economics of infertility.”

“Here is what I’ve learned from having walked through more medical thresholds than I ever expected to by my mid-thirties: survival isn’t just the moment you receive the worst news of your life. Survival is waking up the next day, and the day after that, and figuring out how to carry yourself through the ordinary texture of a life that has been permanently rearranged.

I’ve faced cancer. I know what it is to move through the strange dual reality of a diagnosis. The terror of it, yes, but also the unexpected clarity.”

“The unfortunate reality of navigating a complex fertility journey is that every doctor has a different approach, a different protocol, a different philosophy about what to try and in what order. The medical system, as it currently exists, does not have a centralized place where patients can go to understand their full landscape of options.

What fills that gap, more often than not, is other women and patients talking to each other.”

“When hard things happen, it becomes very difficult to believe that pain and joy can coexist. That you can be in the depths of something genuinely devastating and still reach, legitimately and without guilt, for something that makes you feel alive.

IVF makes joy feel dangerous. It makes hope feel dangerous. Because the flip side of hope is the specific agony of wanting something so badly and not knowing if you’ll get it.”

“When I think about what it means to face suffering with intention, I think about my mother.

She lost two of her sisters unexpectedly. She navigated seven years of infertility. Seven years of hoping and waiting and not knowing, in a time and a culture where that particular pain was carried almost entirely in silence. And with every single one of them, she made a choice.”

“Mitch and I, road tripping back from our fertility clinic in Windsor, are the particular kind of exhausted that settles into your bones after a week of early mornings and needles and waiting and hoping. And for the last six of those hours, we have been scream-singing our favourite songs at full volume into the darkness of the highway.

There was maniacal laughing, and of course there were a lot of tears. Catharsis.”

“For years, when hard things happened, I kept turning to the wrong people. People I wished could show up for me. People I thought should be able to, by virtue of history or family or proximity or the simple fact that I would have shown up for them.

And I would be left on read.”

“We don’t act because we’re confident. We’re confident because we act.

Confidence is not a personality trait you either have or you don’t. It is a side effect of taking action. It is your brain’s accumulated proof of your own capabilities, built one decision at a time, one hard thing survived at a time. It is earned in the doing and destroyed in the overthinking.”

“Here it is: you do not have to extend empathy, understanding, and emotional labour to everyone just because you’ve been through enough to relate to most people.

Not everyone is deserving of your empathy. Your empathy, like every other finite resource you possess, deserves to be spent wisely.”

“I come from a long line of warriors.

And when I am walking out of the fertility clinic with bad news, injecting hormones and waiting to see how many eggs my body has been willing to give us, I reach back through that lineage and I let it carry me. Resilience, I have learned, is not only a personal trait — in some ways, it is something that can be inherited.”

“The nausea from the stimulation medications got the best of me today, and I had to surrender to it. I didn’t fight it or push through it or try to be productive in spite of it. I became one with the couch and I let my body do what it needed to do.

This is the truthiest truth I know about surviving hard things: sometimes you have to give into how much something sucks in order to survive it.”

“We all know a person, or have maybe been this person, who builds the structure of their personality and life around one central pillar. They are so focused on one area of life that the other parts of themselves slowly disappear.

It’s in times of uncertainty and struggle that you find that everything staked on that one pillar comes crashing down with it. That’s exactly what happened to me.”

“A majority of women report regularly feeling dismissed when sharing symptoms with their healthcare providers. Not listened to, minimized, redirected, and told it’s probably anxiety or stress.

Mortality rates through pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum are highest for Black women because pain and complications are minimized, overlooked, and not taken seriously by the systems meant to protect them. This is happening every single day inside institutions we are told to trust with our survival.”

“Rest makes you more resilient.

Consistent, adequate sleep improves our ability to regulate emotion. It restores cognitive flexibility — the capacity to adapt our thinking in response to new information. It reduces the physiological stress load that accumulates during sustained difficulty. Whether it’s active rest, sleep, or other activities that help you restore yourself, rest is critical to having the reserves to do hard things.”

“There was a session with my therapist where I had broken down completely. I was recounting one of the traumas the last few years had brought, and I started minimizing how it impacted me after feeling shame for admitting how much it actually messed me up.

As I tried to walk back what I said, she stopped me and said: “Komal, I believe you.””

“When we got our numbers from the egg retrieval, I was a very sad girl.

The mature egg number was not what we had hoped. The fertilization number made me nervous and so fearful. Something in me finally made the decision that I have come to understand, over years of hard things, is sometimes the only way through.

I let the dream burn to the ground.”

“There is a type of grief that doesn’t have rituals, care, or acknowledgement tied to it. There’s no flowers, or cards, or ceremonies attached — often just lonely thoughts, days, and periods of time where you’re left on your own trying to process it.

Therapists call it disenfranchised grief. Today, I’m talking about the grief of who you thought you were going to be.”

“The older I get the more I realize that when joy does show up, we have to cherish it. Life comes at us hard and fast, seasons of pain compound, and when joy arrives we can so easily doubt it. We can wonder… why are you here? Is something terrible just around the corner?

But the last 18 days have shown me that we have to embrace joy when it’s here. Joy and genuine appreciation of good moments can be a protective factor in coping.”

“What I shared yesterday felt like the right ending: two embryos, hard-won joy, the beginning of rest, a kind of storybook ending to all this tumult. I was ready to close this chapter and breathe for a moment before whatever came next.

Then ‘whatever came next’ arrived sooner than I expected. Both of our embryos came back from genetic testing as aneuploid. Not chromosomally sound. Not viable for transfer.

We are back at the beginning.”