Life can be both beautiful and hard at the same time, and our task is to learn how to live that reality without hardening our hearts. I have never felt more broken and grateful at the same time. There's a freedom in acknowledging that you can't control everything. Perhaps joy isn't about forcing yourself to feel better, but about taking small, honest steps and allowing both pain and beauty to coexist.

How often are we ignored? Made to feel that because our bodies can’t do this specific thing or look a certain way, we matter less. All we want is to be seen. Even if we are not gifted like young Matilda, we all have talents and interests, things that should be celebrated instead of tolerated or flat-out rejected.

I broke into a million pieces, and I can’t go back This is the truth infertility forces us to face: we can’t go back. We can’t return to who we were before the diagnosis, before the loss, before the treatments, before the years of waiting. That version of ourselves—the one who believed our bodies would cooperate, who thought motherhood was just a matter of timing, who hadn’t yet learned what it means to grieve something that never was—she’s gone.