Existing While Feeling Like You Need to Arrive Somewhere
Content notes: executive dysfunction, fertility journey, past relationships, grief, polyamory, liminal spaces, mythology, self-worth
Today is cycle day 14, and I had my IUI yesterday! I was pretty fatigued last night, but my partner nurtured me immensely, and now, I’m doing a lot better! But I’m in that suspended state again of waiting to see if conception happens and if I’ll be pregnant or not. I am trying very hard not to interpret every twinge.
Today’s post isn’t just about my fertility journey. I have a lot of existential thoughts to get through.
I know who I am. I know what it took me to get to this point.
And also: I’m still figuring it out. Both things. All the time.
I feel like I’m perpetually in this space between action and outcome. The interior work no one else can see. The question I keep circling back to—whether I’m allowed to exist in this moment without first proving I deserve to be here.
I am allowed. I know this. I know this.
The knowing isn’t the problem.
The Fog of “Enough”
It’s not about being perfect. I know that people have made that assumption about me… that I’m trying to be a perfectionist. I think that’s what a lot of people interpret from my AuDHD “way of being.”
Perfectionism has edges you can argue with. Corners you can chip away at. You can point at perfectionism and say: that’s unreasonable, that’s impossible, that’s a setup for failure.
But for me, I’m truly not trying to be perfect. I’m trying to figure things out. To figure out if I’ve gathered enough information. To figure out if I’m enough.
But the concept of “enough?”
I think the best way to describe what other people see as efforts to be “perfect” is that my quest for “enough” feels like a fog.
I just want to be enough. Almost like I’m coming up with a reason to be worthy of existing in this moment.
What I know intellectually, academically, and spiritually is that I don’t need a reason. Existence doesn’t require justification. The soft animal of my body (as Mary Oliver would say) is allowed to love what it loves without earning it first.
I will allow myself to keep going. I will allow myself to keep pushing through.
And yet. The felt sense hasn’t caught up. I can’t think my way into deserving my own presence.
This is the thing about executive dysfunction that people don’t always get.
I’m treated for my ADHD. I’m treated for my PTSD. I’m being treated for my depression. And I still struggle with the most basic rituals of self-care. Morning routines. Night routines. The things that supposedly separate functional adults from the “rest of us.”
Something I cannot be ashamed of any longer, despite whatever anyone says (and sentiments I’ve surely expressed before in this blog): I oscillate between being extremely capable—leading teams, publishing research, navigating complex medical systems—and lying in bed unable to move or speak. I literally cannot process during those times. I can take accountability for what happens after, figure out ways to help myself preemptively, but I need support or space during those moments.
For me, this is the binary toggle of chronic disability life.
The world tells me that if I just tried harder, if I just optimized better, if I just figured out the right system, the right app, the right morning routine—I would finally have it together.
But here’s the thing: “having it together” assumes a static state of arrival.
I’m starting to think arrival might be a myth.
Sisyphus Didn’t Fail
My friend brought up Sisyphus the other day. Well, I saw an image on his laptop, and we talked about it.
You know the story. The king condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down every time he reaches the top. The ultimate punishment. The ultimate futility.
Camus famously said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. That’s become almost cliché at this point—the existentialist bumper sticker version of meaning-making.
But I’ve been thinking about it differently.
What if Sisyphus isn’t a morality tale at all? What if it’s not prescriptive—not “this is what happens when you defy the gods” or “this is how you should find meaning in suffering?”
What if it’s just... descriptive?
An illustration of what is. Of what existence actually looks like.
The rock rolls back down. You climb the hill again. The rock rolls back down. You climb again.
I had my IUI. Now I wait. I’ll wait for two weeks. Then I’ll know, or I won’t know, and either way the cycle continues.
I wake up and try to do my morning routine. I fail at my morning routine. I try again the next day. I fail again. I try again.
I reach out to someone I love. The relationship ends badly. I grieve. I heal (partially or fully, whatever these things mean). I reach out to someone new. I try again.
That’s not punishment. That’s just... living.
The myth doesn’t need to be about failure or futility or even finding happiness in absurdity. Maybe it’s just showing us the shape of existence itself. The rolling. The climbing. The rolling again.
And maybe—maybe—the victory isn’t in reaching the top and staying there. Maybe it’s in the climbing and the rolling itself. In the fact that you showed up again. In the fact that Sisyphus puts his shoulder to the boulder every single time, even knowing what comes next.
That’s not failure. That’s the most human thing I can imagine.
The Interior Victory
There’s a kind of triumph that doesn’t look like triumph from the outside.
It’s not the public success, the visible achievement, or the moment where everyone sees you’ve made it. It’s quieter than that. More internal. The kind of victory that requires no witnesses.
The night of my IUI, I told my partner things I’ve been holding for a long time. Insecurities about my body. My dysphoria. How uncertain everything feels—not just the fertility journey, but all of it. The future. My relationships. The paths ahead. The decisions I haven’t made yet.
I didn’t wait until I had it figured out. I didn’t wait until I’d earned the right to speak.
I just... named what was true, from wherever I was standing.
The more I go through those deep, dark healing moments—where I’m scared but actually confronting the things I’ve typically avoided—the more I snap back into who I am.
The world seems clearer.
I have more to do. I can do it. I wonder what else there is that I don’t know about myself—or haven’t realized yet.
I’m becoming more and more me. All the time.
Sigh, it’s exhausting and beautiful to witness my becoming.
Recently, I was told that becoming a parent is part of my transition, not outside of it.
My body is still changing. My life is still changing. The person I’m becoming through all of this. It’s all the same journey.
I am integrating now. I still have dysphoria, don’t get me wrong. But I’m integrating into who I am. I can tie who I see in the external into my internal world, and I don’t think I could have said that pre-2022. I couldn’t have.
And now, I can.
I start testosterone, I stop testosterone, I try to have a baby, I try to be okay with possibly not having a baby, I like my soft femininity, I crave masculinity….
The rock rolls back down. I climb again.
On Impact and the Questions We Don’t Ask
I’ve been thinking about this quote from Afsa Rosette:
“Self-awareness is not about knowing why you did something. It’s about asking how your behaviour landed in someone else’s nervous system. Did they feel safe? Did they feel heard? Did your silence feel like punishment? Did your defensiveness feel like minimisation? Did your ‘I didn’t mean it’ feel like a dismissal of their wound? Most people don’t ask these questions bc these questions dismantle the protective story they tell about who they think they are. But growth begins when you let your ego die a little. That’s how you stop repeating history. That’s how you stop becoming the scar someone else has to heal from. That’s how you start loving in a way that actually feels like love on the receiving end. At the end of the day, people don’t remember your excuses. They remember your impact. Not whether you meant to hurt them… but whether you cared enough to notice when you did.”
I hold this in both hands.
I’ve been on the receiving end of people who didn’t ask how their behavior landed in my nervous system. Who insisted or implied that their intentions should override my experience. Some people did hold my feelings, but didn’t want to budge on how they were involved in the formation of those feelings within me.
(How do you reconcile that? How do you hold both truths when one negates your entire experience?)
And I’ve also been the one who didn’t ask.
Something I am trying to do is not attack someone’s character if I’m upset with them, even if I have reasons or feelings about what happened. (This really only applies to people I’m currently in contact with. I am very aware of how much I’ve attacked my ex-spouse’s character.)
I can step away and decide how to share how I feel or if I need to remove myself from the situation.
I can repair any damage I’ve caused and collaborate.
I also have the autonomy to leave.
Loving yourself means taking responsibility for your actions, even the ignorant ones or the ones you’re not proud of.
I have been mean and unfair to people in my past due to frustration. People have attacked my character too—pretty much all the time. It really hurt when certain exes did that.
But oh well. I’m still here. Still learning.
The situationship I ended abruptly years ago. I still think about them. Not constantly—not the way I used to. But they surface. In the quiet moments between work and rest. In the spaces where my mind wanders while my body heals.
I sent them an apology once. They never read it. Maybe they blocked me. Maybe they couldn’t bear to open it. I don’t know. That’s its own kind of wound—not knowing if repair was even possible, just knowing you offered it into the void.
The love I had for that person—that reckless, consuming, fire-type love—doesn’t go away just because I recognize how unfair it was. I wanted them to fight for me. To make choices I couldn’t make for myself. I made them an unwilling anchor when all they wanted was something simple, something light, and I wanted everything.
That’s not fair. That was never fair.
But the love was real. The love is real. I don’t know if that ever stops being true.
Growth begins when you let your ego die a little. When you ask the hard questions about impact, not just intention. When you stop repeating the patterns that turn you into someone else’s scar.
The rock rolls back down. You climb again. But maybe—if you’ve been paying attention—you climb a little differently this time.
The Shape of Loneliness (Then and Now)
In August, I privately wrote about loneliness on another platform. The kind that doesn’t vanish when the room is crowded with love. The kind that sits quiet and heavy, asking to be named.
I wrote: Do you know what it’s like to watch everyone you love have a place to land while you’re still falling?
I wrote about gripping my own shoulders in the dark just to feel held.
I wrote about wanting to be someone’s person. Not just a date or a lover. Not just a body for desire or a companion for laughter. Wanting to be the one whose absence alters the shape of another’s day.
And now it’s December.
Four months later. My partner came with me to my IUI yesterday. They held my legs up during the post-procedure wait (for the second time in a row!)—that superstitious, medically-debunked ritual where you elevate your legs like it might help, like maybe if you do everything right, the outcome will be different this time.
I know it doesn’t actually improve conception rates. I asked anyway. They held my legs anyway.
That’s not nothing.
That’s someone being your person in the verb sense. Present. Consistent. Choosing you in the quiet ways that actually build a life. Not the dramatic claiming I thought I needed, but the slow accumulation of showing up.
In my August piece, I asked myself: Will I ever have that again?
And the answer isn’t a loud yes. It’s not a triumphant arrival at the top of the hill where I finally get to rest.
It’s my partner on the other end of a video call since May. It’s them in the room with me during something as vulnerable and hope-laden as trying to bring a child into the world. It’s the day-by-day showing up, even though we don’t live together, even though my chronic illness makes everything harder, even though nothing is certain, including whether or not we’ll be together in a year.
Maybe “home” doesn’t announce itself. Maybe it just keeps showing up until you notice you’re already there.
The victory that doesn’t look like a victory. The arriving that doesn’t feel like arriving.
Existing in Liminal Spaces
I’m trying to get more comfortable with liminal spaces and the “times” in between “things.”
The two-week wait. The space between action and outcome. The not-knowing that sits between ovulation and test. Between hope and grief. Between who I’ve been and who I’m becoming. The time in between waking up and being at work.
I want to be in the “now” instead of thinking about all the paths ahead of me. All the decisions I haven’t made yet. The timelines branching: the one where this works, the one where I need surgery in February, the one where I’m a parent, the one where I’m just me, healing.
But my brain doesn’t do “now” easily.
It’s always running probability distributions on the future. Gaming out scenarios. Trying to feel prepared for every possible outcome. This is what happens when you grow up learning that resources are scarce, that failure is dangerous, that you have to earn safety through anticipation.
The problem is that anticipation isn’t the same as living.
And optimizing your way through uncertainty just keeps you stuck in the future, measuring the present against some imagined better state.
Peace is when I do not force alignment with people, objects, places, and things.
I do not want to crave the love of those who cannot or do not love me.
What if the practice isn’t finding the reason I’m worthy of this moment, but noticing the moments when I’ve already entered without one?
And letting those be evidence that the gate was never actually locked?
Like telling my partner my fears the night after the procedure.
The gate was never actually locked.
Spiritually, I wonder if my future child is already here—like if their soul is within me, and we’re just waiting for the right time. I can’t wait to celebrate holidays with them. Meaningful and meaningless ones. I can’t wait.
But also: I’m here now. In the waiting. In the not-knowing.
Still allowed to exist in this moment.
The Dream
The night before my IUI—two nights ago now—I had a dream.
My ex-partner—one I agonized over for months after our breakup—appeared and truly apologized. In a way that felt final and helpful. They talked about being married, about how it had helped them understand how they’d impacted me.
Of course, this was a dream version of them. We don’t talk anymore. They feel like a distant memory from a different life now.
But something about the timing.
My psyche offering me what that person couldn’t or wouldn’t give in waking life, the night before I underwent something profound and hopeful.
Like it was clearing the way.
I don’t know what to make of it, really. I’m not sure dreams mean anything beyond what we decide they mean.
But I’m choosing to see it as grace—not from them, but from some part of me that’s ready to stop carrying it.
The rock rolls back down. Maybe this time, it’s a little lighter.
On Fire and What Comes After
I still miss the fire.
That consuming desire. The intensity of wanting someone so much that it rewrote your brain chemistry. The hyperfocus of falling, of needing, of playing along with the fantasy and wishing it were real.
The situationships that had that fire. So did other relationships.
And when they ended, I was left with the question: can I ever have that again without it destroying me?
I think the answer is yes, but it might feel different.
The fire I miss was fed, in part, by uncertainty. By the gap. By longing. By the chronic not-knowing whether this person wanted me back the same way.
Secure attachment has fire too. But it’s more like a hearth than a wildfire. It doesn’t need the wind of instability to burn. It doesn’t leave you in ashes.
That might mean grieving the specific kind of desire that intensity produced.
Even as I build something that won’t consume me. Even as I learn that “home” can feel like warmth without the destruction.
I’ve written about the haṁsa—the sacred swan or wild goose in Hindu tradition—which is said to be able to separate milk from water. If you give it a mixture, it drinks only the milk and leaves the water behind. Essence from illusion. What nourishes from what just looks like it might.
I’m trying to develop that capacity.
To sense the difference between what actually feeds me and what just looks like it could. To stop drinking the whole mixture just because some of it is good.
The haṁsa doesn’t reject the water with contempt. It just... doesn’t need it.
It knows what it came for.
I am coming into clarity about who I am.
Not Arriving
I rarely have neat conclusions anymore.
I’m still here, in the middle of the two-week wait. Trying not to symptom-spot every twinge. Managing my executive dysfunction. Trying to remember my morning routines. Failing at my morning routines. Trying again.
I’m still grieving the people I loved and lost. Still carrying the loves that didn’t work out. Still thinking about Sisyphus and his boulder and the way the myth might just be describing what existence looks like.
We don’t arrive. We just keep showing up.
The rock rolls back down. We put our shoulder to it again.
Not because we’re being punished. Not because we’re finding meaning in absurdity. Just because that’s what living is. The showing up. The trying again. The small interior victories that no one else can see.
I will allow myself to keep going.
I will allow myself to keep pushing through.
I may not know all my needs at any given point.
I may be highly foolish or extremely wise—it’s a spectrum.
I may still be at war with myself—but I still have power.
I still have power over myself.
I may have any possible emotions, that are available to me within this body—but that’s not going to stop me from being who I am.