Infertility is like the movie Twilight.

I know that sounds crazy – stay with me, and I’ll explain.

I didn’t read the Twilight books as a teenager, and I watched the first movie for the first time a couple of years ago with a dear friend who is doing her best to educate me in the pop culture I missed in my youth.

One of the first things I noticed watching Twilight (besides the cringey moodiness) was the blue filter the whole movie was shot with. The overcast climate of Forks, Washington and the teenage mopiness were emphasized with this creative choice. We the audience were forced to see the story a certain way – like wearing tinted sunglasses. Maybe the director thought it would help viewers willingly suspend their disbelief that a really old vampire would fall in love with an immature and socially awkward teenage girl. Who knows? My point isn’t really Twilight. My point is that we can often see life through the blue filter of infertility. 

When the blue filter of infertility stands between us and life, everything is viewed, thought, felt, and evaluated in relation to our attempt to get pregnant. It often begins from a more hopeful and positive perspective, viewing everything through the lens of what if I am pregnant in the near future?

I can’t buy those jeans because what if I get pregnant next cycle? 

I can’t have a cocktail at this party because what if I’m pregnant right now? 

But as time passes with no positive pregnancy test, the blue filter of infertility becomes more obsessive and rigid. It becomes about controlling all of the factors you think you need to control in order to get pregnant.

I can’t go visit a friend out of state because what if I have to do bloodwork or go for an ultrasound at that point in my cycle? 

We can’t go out to eat with friends because it doesn’t fit into my fertility diet. 

I can’t go out for a girls’ night because I need to be asleep by 9pm for my hormone health.

And on and on and on. Our whole life becomes viewed through the blue filter of infertility, and in so doing, our whole life becomes about this one thing. 

To use another filmmaking analogy, the trying-to-overcome-infertility obsession is like being zoomed in on one part of the story, only focusing on one storyline. It’s all we can see. We’re so intensely focused on one thing, we don’t see everything else happening “off screen.” 

So, how do we grow out of this obsessive mindset? We throw away the blue filter, and we zoom out.

When we zoom out, we realize that infertility is just one part of my story – it is not my whole story. It may always be part of my story, but it is only one part. We should strive to see it as a  factoid in a main character’s otherwise full and busy life or a subplot that gets minimal screen time. 

That sounds nice, but how do we do it? I think the problem and the solution are related. The problem is that the blue filter of infertility is powerful – and it’s so powerful because it taps into our sense of identity and forces a change in identity we didn’t want or foresee. Many of us enter marriage with plans to have children, and we couch our identity as “a woman who will be a mom.” This is why the first level of hoping to conceive anxiety is usually framed as “what if I get pregnant in the near future?” But as the near future comes and goes, our identity shifts to “woman who can’t get pregnant for some reason,” and our experience of trying to optimize for pregnancy becomes more obsessive and controlling. I invite you to consider a third phase of the identity transformation, one in which infertility is not the whole story: “Woman who is a daughter of God, who does XYZ, who happens to be struggling with infertility.”

For many of us, an inability to conceive when we want to is the first thing that significantly undermines our identity in our life. My default was to equate my state in life with my identity. I was a kid, then I was a teenager, then I was a college student, and then I was a newlywed wife, but then I was not a mom and I didn’t know who I was anymore. It seemed like the only identity left to me was a working woman, and that had not been my lifelong dream. That was not an identity I wanted, but it was the only alternative I saw for a very long time. But as I wrestled with God and my reality, I learned there was a better, more satisfying identity available to me – that of a daughter of God, beloved by Him, no matter what my state in life or what I’m able to produce.

I’m sure there are other ways to arrive at this identity, but I will share my experience: Two important things were happening at the same time in my life. The first is I really wanted to surrender and trust in God, even though I was terrified to do it because I still associated pain and disappointment with His plan for my life. But I spent a lot of time praying for the grace to surrender and trust in God, and He answered my prayer. Secondly, I was noticing who God the Father is – that He is worthy of trust, faithful, all good, and working for my salvation. I could not deny the many moments of my life, big and small, that were clearly directed or ordained by God. I could not tell myself that the Father had utterly abandoned me or that He did not have some direction for the story of my life, even though I do not fully understand the subplot of my infertility.

But through the grace to trust Him, and by coming to know more clearly that our God is a good and loving God, I was able to relinquish my grasping reach for the identity that was denied to me and to open my hands to receive my true identity that I was being called to all along.

For me, healing was being able to shift my perspective from being zoomed in on the goal of getting pregnant to zooming out and seeing there is more to life than just physical motherhood and that my identity was more than just “woman who can’t get pregnant.”

As I was able to zoom out and shift my focus to my identity as a daughter of God, I could notice all of the other areas of my life that were still “on screen” and worth my time, attention, and energy. Zooming out meant picking up old hobbies again, hobbies I had dropped because striving after conception  took up all my time and energy for over a decade. It meant learning new skills like gardening and crochet. It meant launching new ventures like a parish infertility support group and one-on-one infertility coaching. It meant drinking the cocktail and not taking so many supplements. It meant spending less time, money, and effort on trying to overcome my infertility.

And the result is that I became happier and more at peace. I found meaning and purpose in helping other women at church and through coaching. I have more joy in my life when I’m growing plants and working on a creative project. I am practicing surrender to the Lord in my circumstances and trusting in His Providence and plan as his beloved daughter. I discovered that life is better when I threw away the blue filter of infertility and zoomed out to see the full picture. The good news is you can do it too.

Paula Gallagher founded and runs her parish infertility support group, the Instagram account @catholic.infertility.coaching, the website Catholic Infertility Resources, and her online coaching business Catholic Infertility Coaching. She and her husband Robert have experienced 13 years of primary infertility, have been foster parents, and are hoping to adopt in the future.