Here There Be Dragons

I am mixed up, turned about, inside out and backwards. I don't know how I feel anymore about TTC-ing and I don't know how to talk about that. I don't know when I will feel "normal" again, will feel hopeful again. That is assuming that I will again ever.

I am burned out, I think, from the supreme effort of keeping this crap going for a year. There is only so many times to can be beat over the head by Hope in her seemingly infinite variations on that theme. The loss after loss after loss, in whatever form it takes that time, gets you feeling all strung out and wrung out and mildewy-dishrag-l.i.m.p.

I don't want to temp, I don't want to check CM, I don't want to take Clomid or Prometrium or various herbal combinations. I don't even want to have sex, for chrissakes. I just don't think any of it is going to work. I think the real problem here is some sort of mind-body death spiral that I just can't quite put my finger on yet. Something in there thinks that if I could just define the problem appropriately, it would vanish--poof--like a cloud of fairy dust. The rest of me just thinks the whole thing is an elaborate mind fuck.

And the kicker? I don't know where to go with this. I don't know who to talk to, who to vent to (grammar rules bedamned). My DH? Fuggedaboutit. He is the very soul of optimism and will brook no dissent. It feels like the worst kind of whining to vent to my online TTC friends, who are at their own difficult forks in the IF road. And, as we know, the "real life" friends are fortunate enough to have been spared this path and so have nothing but well-intentioned good wishes to add.

So, beyond the deep and wide blackness that is this hell, I am saddened that the very fact of being here isolates me from everyone. As the process drags on and on and on, I have found myself retreating to ever-more-tiny groups of people who "get it." Is this self-protection? Bitchiness? Both? I can't decide. I do know that many other of my fellow IF sloggers feel this pressure to both reach out to like-minded others and to constantly redefine who has the chops to be called "like-minded." I understand this and feel it myself and I think it's necessary and it makes me so very very sad.

Did I mention I get to have my tubes blown out today? There should be a warning label. Really.