35 & learning that your wins are my wins

How I let a friend's good news bring out my scarcity mentality.

A few days ago one of my best friend’s told me she is pregnant, 13 weeks to be exact. I never knew I could be so undeniably happy for someone whilst also being so incredibly sad for myself. 

When she told me I burst into tears and if I am being completely honest I don’t know if my tears were for her happiness or my grief. Grief that I have not been able to share those words with anyone yet. I’m pregnant. 

I never thought the road to fertility would be this messy. I have spent my whole life trying not to get pregnant and now because of my age I am expected to sneeze and get pregnant. ‘Time is running out. You don’t want to wait any longer. You should have frozen your eggs already’. These used to be the words of others but now as I hear her say those words, I am pregnant, I realise the words of others have now become the beliefs I hold for myself. Instead of jumping to automatic celebration I went to the belief that time is running out for me. I know that my tears were falling partly because I was comparing myself to her as if her abundance somehow increases my scarcity. 

When I put on my analytical brain it's crazy because we haven’t even been trying for very long and I know that they alway say stress and pressure aren’t great for fertility but try telling that to a 35 year old woman who is constantly being reminded of her impending infertility. 

Despite my attempts at hiding my own sense of sadness I know she could tell. That's the thing about having soul sisters, they know you better than you know yourself.  In the moments of her greatest happiness I feel like I let her down. As our conversation progressed I watched her shirk her happiness in an attempt to diminish my own self despair. It hurts to reflect on this. I don’t want anyone to filter their happiness because of what I don’t have. I wonder if everyone feels like this? Conflicting by holding their own sadness whilst celebrating someone else's success? Can I hold my own sadness and embrace her happiness at the same time? 

We fumbled through our conversation, both tip-toeing around one another until I finally couldn’t help myself. Instead of being open and honest about feeling elated for her whilst navigating some sadness for myself I went for the passive aggressive option of throwing out comments like ‘I cannot wait to be sharing this news with you one day’ ‘Hopefully it will happen for me soon’ 

I also decided to remind her that exactly one year ago, when she was in her depths of despair about meeting someone and starting a family, I was the one that told her she could meet someone and have a baby within a year. Congratulating myself as if I had created this reality for her. But I wasn't saying it for her. I was saying it for myself. I was reaffirming to myself this belief that I held for her but didn’t quite believe for myself. 

I could feel the awkwardness on the phone. We were both feeling it and instead of calling me out for making this about me she chose to do what women have done for generations. She chose to put my happiness ahead of her own. She chose to spend the next 20 minutes reassuring me that it would happen for me and list off all the reasons why she believed that to be true. Instead of basking in her celebration like she should, I watched my beautiful, smart, loving friend shrink her happiness out of fear of offending me. 

Ugh. 

The foundation of my work is based around wanting women to break free for the belief that our worth is tied up in who we can be for everyone else. I literally teach women how not to shrink themselves to accommodate others; however, in that moment, when she shrunk her happiness to accommodate my feelings, it felt good. I found comfort in her navigating my emotions ahead of her own. Just because it felt good doesn’t make it right it just means that it is familiar. I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t been guilty of putting the wants and needs of others ahead of their own. This is what I have been taught and despite not agreeing with it there is still such comfort in it. I guess I am just as guilty as anyone for continuing to champion this pattern for women and our call highlighted this for me. 

I have spent my entire life being pitted against other women believing that only one of us can win. That if she is beautiful it means I am not. If she is successful, I am not. If she has a great partner then I cannot. My whole life around women has been a feeling of less than. 

We ended our call and I felt so disconnected. I didn’t share honestly and I know I diminished some of her happiness by not speaking my truth. A smart choice would have been to call her back and lay it all out but instead I decided to throw myself a little pity party. I ordered a miso tofu cheesecake and let the couch devour me, phone at the ready. Without a moment's thought I started scrolling instagram looking for trouble. That's the thing about comparison, it's addictive. Despite knowing how awful it is and that it doesn’t leave me feeling good it does feed a part of me that enjoys self pity and being a victim. Sitting on that couch I fed my self doubt as rapidly as I fed my feelings with that cheesecake, fast and mindlessly. During my scroll hole someone popped up on my search feed who I know but I am not friendly with. I clicked on their profile and the first post I see is a baby announcement. I don’t know what I was looking for but this wasn’t it. This felt like a double edged sword. 

Instead of putting my phone down and getting out of my head I spent the next forty minutes on her profile piecing her life story together. Creating narratives about the father of a yet to be born baby, about the state of their relationship, the quality of their life currently and what it will be like after the baby is born. Since I am  being one hundred percent honest the narrative I created wasn’t favourable. It was about a cheating partner, an absent father and a sad and lonely life. To diminish my own sadness, not only have I allowed my friend to diminish hers I have also created an extremely horrible reality for someone I hardly know. 

I put my phone down and decided that I had dived deep enough. In my friend's most special moment I made it about me. I could have just celebrated with her and  regulated my own emotions outside of our call but I didn’t. The best I can offer up is an apology and the acceptance that I am learning. Learning about the person I want to be and the steps I can take to meet that person. I know she is in there. I also know that it is OK for me to feel sadness at somebody else's success but what's not OK is if I make that other person feel like they have to shrink their successes around me. I want people to celebrate the shit out of themselves around me because it reaffirms what is possible. Both can exist. 

I am only realising most of this now as I sit here and write about it. I find it hard to lie to myself through the written word. My mind can be very manipulative and give me a thousand justifications for my actions but words force me to take accountability. I like that about writing. I guess this is why I, like so many, have adopted a journaling practice. It is a space for me to be radically honest with myself but in a place that can be hidden. I however don’t want to hide it. For 35 years I have kept my thoughts hidden and to be quite honest it's utterly exhausting. It also allows me to clear the mental clutter from my mind and to connect back into my heart and in my heart I am beyond excited for her to become a mum and I am also excited for the girl I hardly know whose life I condensed down into a horrible narrative. 

Another funny thing about soul sisters is that they will eventually bring to the surface what you won’t. My friend called me today and attempted to bring up what we both felt. She talked about how she was struggling to feel joy in her pregnancy and that she isn’t allowing herself to celebrate. I apologised for how I reacted and we spoke about how we both hold this mindset that another woman's success means our failure. There and then on the call we decided to give ourselves a little reframe. To remind ourselves that when one of us wins we both win. Her success is my success and my success is her success. We also realised that we are utterly rubbish at celebrating our successes. She wrote and published a book last year, I got engaged, she is now pregnant and not once have either of us celebrated. When people have congratulated us we have downplayed our experience often making ourselves so small in the process. This is not good enough. I deserve to celebrate, she deserves to celebrate, women deserve to celebrate. 

Fuck being small, fuck shying away, fuck being modest. I want to dance in the art of celebration and I want to feel what it is like to truly and deeply celebrate myself and others. 

The question is how and where do I start? 

I haven’t grown up with role models in the art of female celebration and to be honest I don’t know many women who have. I have seen women around me shy away from compliments, minimise their achievements, pass off their success to luck and praise other people as if their lives depend on it. Where are the goddesses dripping in compliments and wearing their achievements like gold jewellery around their necks? I know where they are and I know that I have been avoiding them. There are some incredible coaches I follow on instagram who are all of these things and they have been triggering serious discomfort within me which I have projected by labelling them showy, out of touch and self obsessed. They aren’t really any of these things, I think they might actually just be free.

So I have set myself a task, to learn from them. To embrace the art of celebration and to practise it until it becomes a part of my DNA. To make sure that my friends also know these women exist and that we all start to live a little more in celebration. Celebration for being a woman, for being alive, for making it this far and for showing up each day.