A Guest Post, Courtesy of The Great Blog Cross Pollination

I'm participating in the Great Blog Cross Pollination put on by Geode!


So on to the guest post ...

Heady infertility:

There is a literary term called irreality that has gone through many permutations in definition. People use it to describe a whole host of storylines, though when I first learned the term, it was used to describe the knowledge of the real juxtaposed with the sense of the internal unreal. You know that feeling you get when you leave your office in the middle of the day to have a wanding and blood draw and then slip back to your desk, a worker with this secret life that is both reality and irreality to you. I mean, who ever thinks before it begins that they'll end up at a fertility clinic doing mid-morning blood draws? Unless, of course, you are functionally infertile and had a pretty good inkling that you'd need some help getting pregnant. So maybe it's only irreality to those whose infertility came as a complete shock.

I liked this description that I found in Wikipedia:

A type of existentialist literature in which the means are continually and absurdly rebelling against the ends that we have determined for them. An example of this would be Franz Kafka's story Metamorphosis, in which the salesman Gregor Samsa's plans for supporting his family and rising up in rank by hard work and determination are suddenly thrown topsy-turvy by his sudden and inexplicable transformation into a man-sized insect. Such fiction is said to emphasize the fact that human consciousness, being finite in nature, can never make complete sense of, or successfully order, a universe that is infinite in its aspects and possibilities. Which is to say: as much as we might try to order our world with a certain set of norms and goals (which we consider our real world), the paradox of a finite consciousness in an infinite universe creates a zone of irreality ("that which is beyond the real") that offsets, opposes, or threatens the real world of the human subject. Irrealist writing often highlights this irreality, and our strange fascination with it, by combining the unease we feel because the real world doesn't conform to our desires with the narrative quality of the dream state.

Sometimes I feel like infertility is like waking up one morning and discovering you're a beetle.

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