Day 6 of IVF: Consume art that will help you survive the hard things (and give you the catharsis you need)
They're not just movies or books, they're your lifeline
Welcome to Part Six of Lessons in Human Resilience, one post for each day of my IVF retrieval, documented so that we both remember what we’re capable of surviving.
We have been in the car for six hours.
Mitch and I, road tripping back from to 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. Not our usual road trip recipe, but this is a big week after all, and this is the messy chaos of IVF retrieval. All of it culminating into something critical.
Catharsis.
An emotional purge that is required to keep those emotions from metastasizing into something else. Shoutout to the musicians that help us feel it all.
The Songs That Find You at the Right Moment
Baby Steps by Olivia Dean always gets me on this infertility journey. There’s something about the self love it holds and demands that lands differently when you’re in the middle of something that requires exactly that. Baby steps. One injection, one ultrasound, one appointment at a time.
Drops of Jupiter came on and I felt my throat tighten immediately. I remembered the lead singer wrote it for his mother after she died fighting breast cancer. When I hear it now, I hear it for my cousin Mandy, who left us suddenly and far too young two years ago, also to breast cancer. Sometimes that song is too much. Sometimes it arrives at exactly the right moment and cracks something open that needed to be opened.
Today was a lot of Linkin Park. Which should tell you everything you need to know about the why I lost my voice after the drive.
The thing about the right song at the right moment is that it does something therapy and journaling and even the people who love us most sometimes can’t. It meets us in the feeling without requiring us to explain it. It remind us that someone else has been here. Someone else survived this feeling and made something beautiful out of it. And somehow that mirroring helps us process and move forward.
Art as Vicarious Survival
Films, books, and music can genuinely help us process pain rather than just distract us from it.
When we watch or read or listen to someone else surviving something in a real, messy, and relatable way, it builds what psychologists call self-efficacy. Our belief in our own capacity to do hard things. We witness someone navigating what we’re navigating, and something in our nervous system takes note. It can be done. Someone did it. Maybe I can too.
The art gives us a companion for the parts of ourselves we’re sometimes too scared to face directly.
This is what The Wedding People did for me this year. I want to recommend that book to every single person navigating infertility or grief or the particular experience of watching the life you planned dissolve and having to decide what to build in its place. Reading Phoebe (the protagonist) reclaim herself in the middle of so much loss, in such a raw, honest, cutting, and ultimately hopeful way, helped me see that I could do the same. Her surviving and processing so honestly gave me permission to believe I could do the same.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart did this. Certain episodes of television. Certain poems. Certain photographs. Certain paintings.
Bless every single one of those creatives. Using art to process their pain gave me a way to process mine.
A Note of Caution
I want to be honest about the other side of this, because I think it matters.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is one of the most consuming pieces of writing about grief that exists. It is also the book that, when I read it at the wrong moment, took me straight back to the hospital room with Mandy in her final days. This lead to several days of processing that I was not prepared for and that hit like a wave I hadn’t seen coming.
The experience wasn’t without value. Things that needed to surface did surface. But I could have done without that particular ambush in that particular season.
So be mindful of what you reach for and when.
The same piece of art that carries you one month might undo you the next, but that’s not a reason to avoid it. It’s a reason to stay curious and honest with yourself about what you’re ready for. Sometimes you need the Olivia Dean. Sometimes you need the Linkin Park. And sometimes you need to gently put the Joan Didion down and come back to it when you’re steadier (I’m still waiting for when I’m ready).
Let what you consume support you. Let it open you at the pace you can handle. And when something lands harder than expected, let that be information about what still needs tending, and what hasn’t finished being felt.
What’s On Your Playlist?
I’d genuinely love to know. The songs, the books, the shows, the films that have found you at the right moment on a hard journey. The art that gave you permission to feel something you’d been carrying alone.
Leave them in the comments. Let’s build a collection of the things that have carried us! Who knows, someone reading this right now might need exactly what you’ve found.
With love,
Komal
Your Daily Prompt
Take a moment to write and reflect on the following, in your journal by hand, in the comments, or in your notes app:
What song, book, film, or piece of art has found you at exactly the right moment on a hard journey? What did it open in you that you couldn’t access any other way? And is there something you’ve been avoiding consuming because you’re not sure you’re ready? Why?
Drop your answers in the comments!
Free Live Journaling Salon - June 16
Join me June 16th at 1pm EST for a free live virtual Journaling Salon on the topic of OVERCOMING.
I will lead us through guided journaling and facilitated discussion to unpack the challenges we are facing right now and better understand the support we need.
This is a place to process your life with structure, support, and a community that wants to see you succeed.
I host these monthly inside our paid subscription here on Substack the Lessons Learned Community. I’ll share more at the salon.
Can’t wait to be in the room with you.
Take This Series With You
I created a free Resilience Companion: A Journaling Guide to Lessons in Human Resilience to accompany these essays and videos. Each section includes a brief summary of the lesson and prompts to help you apply it to your own life.
No right answers. Just write freely, and come back to these pages as often as you need.
Lessons in Human Resilience is a series running throughout my IVF retrieval process. Part Seven drops tomorrow.
If you missed Part Five: You Get to Decide What Your Suffering Looks Like, you can catch up here.
The Linkin Park x Jay Z album Collision Course will forever be a fave scream singing catharsis hybrid. Ya know?