Sound the fashion alarm, because big-time blogger and all-round legend, Leandra Medine, is having twins.
The queen of tongue-in-cheek style made the announcement on her site, Manrepeller, today – and was beautifully candid about her struggle to conceive.
By last June at the Beverly Hills Hotel, it had already been seven months since I first learned that I was pregnant with a nonviable foetus and six months since the pregnancy ended. We had passed all the milestones, including the would-be birthday of the baby-that-never-was. I “should have” been recovered by then according to the heartbreaking stories of loss I was fed. “Once the oven is hot, it yearns to make more kids,” they would tell me as if a conciliatory prize. But where were mine? I wasn’t even close. I was dead inside. Cold.
Leandra had previously written about her experience with miscarriage last year, but in this post delves deeper into the ongoing heartache she experienced after losing her baby – and gives an honest depiction of what trying to conceive when you have complications actually looks like.
I had tried everything that winter to recover: acupuncture after three rounds of Clomid (an ovary stimulator), infrared sauna emergence, yoga, meditation, hypnosis and Letrozole (an ovary stimulator — and breast cancer treatment method, actually — that purportedly works better for thin people), journaling, progesterone, a mood-lifting diet, a fertility diet. I recorded all of these pursuits, hoping that just as it had been before, writing would serve as a sweet release. But none of it worked. I hoped it would eject the darkness that trailed me like an annoying cough, but it only threw me in deeper. I felt shame every time a sun salutation didn’t put me at ease. I cried when I was too scared to meditate because I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts. That fertility diet was bullshit.
In the post, she talks about the way her fertility struggle affected her mental health.
…Emotionally, I couldn’t shake the interminable feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be here — that the earth was rejecting me but not letting me die.
Leandra is now 22 weeks pregnant, but is well aware how many people follow her website and still struggle with infertility.
…I still don’t know what to say to make it better. If you’re going through it, I still want to be here for you. I haven’t graduated from compassion. If there is anything I have learned, it is that no state of existence lasts forever. If you could remember a version of yourself who you loved, she’s still in there and sometimes recognizing that is enough.
It’s a powerful read, even if you’re nowhere near thinking about babies – her experience covers depression, self-sabotage, and a shitload of personal realisation. Read the full post on Manrepeller here.
