This post is a continuation to ‘Pregnancy turning you into Emotional Superhero’.
At the end of the post I said I would be looking into some of the reactions and my experience within finding out that I was pregnant.
So the most predominant experience around finding out that I was pregnant was a definitive negative one. I immediately started reasoning with myself why I could not be pregnant as a way to cope and avoid the possibility of pregnancy.
Then when I found out I was pregnant, I remember cutting the lawn on our little riding grass mower, where I had to constantly pull myself out of thoughts of ‘Fuuuck, I am pregnant!!! WTF!!!’ to focusing on the task at hand and not ending up getting stuck in a hole or ditch.
After some time went by and had had the time to process this reality change, I started looking at this negative/bad experience and where it comes from. Because looking at it in a more calm state of mind, looking at the concept of ‘pregnancy’ – there’s nothing intrinsically ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ about it; which meant that at some point (or several points) throughout my life, I had created an interpretation about pregnancy which was emotionally loaded. This is now where I had already made the decision to go through with pregnancy, and obviously, I didn’t want this negative emotional experience to be running in the background while I am pregnant – I want to celebrate and enjoy pregnancy as the life-bearing and creating event that it is.
So when I looked a bit deeper into the emotion experience, I saw that – fascinatingly enough – a lot of moments and snapshots came up from movies, series as well as memories of friends and family (though mostly jokes).
In terms of series and movies, these were mostly high school/college related, where someone gets pregnant really young and this is then REALLY BAD NEWS. Since I am 22 going on 23, I consider myself ‘very young’, especially since I don’t feel much older than when I was 16….
Within this perception, where I have labelled myself as ‘young’; I immediately created the connection that ‘young’ + ‘pregnant’ = bad.
Then in terms of friends and family, there had been occasions where I had to share some ‘bad news’ where the joking response was ‘you’re not pregnant are you’ – again reconfirming the idea that pregnancy = bad.
Because I had already created a judgment about pregnancy and babies, kind of made it a ‘taboo’ subject inside my mind – I had never really explored who I am in relation to pregnancy/babies or who I would like to be.
So when I found out that I am actually pregnant and this shit is happening for real – I drew from the only information I had stored inside myself, and went into a negative experience and reaction about it.
Looking at this information inside myself and seeing how I had created this experience around pregnancy was cool, because now I could simply decide to let go of this experience, as this was not how I wanted to live my days being pregnant.