Then and Now: Victim vs Survivor

Last night before I went to bed, I started mulling over my previous post and this idea came. What else was different then and now? Back then I felt like a victim. Totally. Completely. Indisputably. I felt confused because of the many feelings that I was experiencing and when I confided them to my closest friends, they didn't understand. I needed to reach out to people who understood, who would help me validate my feelings, who could make me feel "sane" in all the insanity that I felt. 

So during my search for sanity amidst the storms of IF, I started sharing infertility articles that validated my "plight", but I shared those as a victim. I shared those mostly because I wanted to understand myself and mostly because I felt like screaming out to others, "Look at me!!! I'm in pain. Great pain. Now I'm beginning to understand why. I have the right to feel all this and I am NOT crazy. I know you probably don't even know why I'm in pain. Look at me! Can't you see how many scars I have? Can't you see how much pain some of you have inflicted on me? Can't you??!?!?!?!?!?!?!"


I think the switch started happening gradually but surely after we decided to stop TTC and to surrender to life without kids. It didn't happen over a month or even a year...I think it took more or less two years before my victim mentality was finally taken over almost completely by my survivor mentality. I'm an IF survivor now, though every now and then the shadows of the victim mentality zig-zag in and out of my consciousness. 

So nowadays when I share infertility articles, I share them as a survivor. I share them knowing that those who won't open their minds and hearts will probably not understand at all what an infertile may go through, but that those who are willing to listen and open their hearts may be enlightened and that even if only one soul is enlightened and one heart is opened up, then that's for the greater good of mankind.