Fertility Burnout: The Hidden Pattern Nobody Talks About During IVF & Infertility

I wasn't just trying to get pregnant.

I was trying to control everything because I was terrified of what would happen if I couldn't.

Looking back now, I can see how much of my identity was built around being capable. I genuinely glorified that version of myself. I was the woman who could handle anything. I showed up. I got things done. I carried more than I probably should have and secretly felt proud of it.

If something needed doing, I did it. If there was a problem, I solved it. If there was a responsibility to take on, I took it. I thought that was what made me successful. I thought that was what made me a good person.

The type-A version of me would never have thrown clean laundry on the floor. Not twenty years ago. Not ten years ago. Honestly, probably not even five years ago. It would have felt completely unacceptable. Not because the laundry itself mattered, but because of what I would have made it mean. Leaving it there would have triggered guilt. It would have triggered judgment.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I would have been telling myself that lazy people leave laundry on the floor and successful people don't. The clothes would have been folded and put away long before I ever had a chance to notice how I felt about them.

That's the interesting thing about awareness. Before you become aware of your patterns, you don't even realize they're patterns. They just feel like reality. They feel like who you are. You move through your days operating from the same thoughts, the same beliefs, the same emotional reactions, and because they're familiar, you never question them.

Then one day something shifts. You start paying attention. You begin seeing things as they actually are instead of how you've always interpreted them. And once that happens, you can't unsee it.

When that awareness started happening for me, I remember looking at my own life and wondering how the hell I had managed to sustain it for so long. From the outside, I wasn't doing manual labor. I wasn't digging ditches or carrying bricks or spending twelve hours a day harvesting crops. Yet I was exhausted all the time. Deeply exhausted.

The kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn't seem to fix. The kind of exhaustion that follows you into every room of your life. What I eventually realized was that constantly managing myself, my emotions, my environment, and everyone else's expectations was one of the hardest jobs I'd ever had.

And fertility has a funny way of exposing that. Most women I work with are incredibly intelligent. They're capable. They're successful. They know how to solve problems. They know how to figure things out. Those qualities have served them well in almost every area of life.

Then fertility comes along and refuses to cooperate. Suddenly all the skills that worked everywhere else stop producing results. The harder they push, the more exhausted they become. The more they learn, the more confused they feel. The more they try to control the process, the more out of control everything feels.

What I see over and over again is women believing they're stressed because fertility is hard. And of course fertility is hard. But often what we're really looking at is a lifelong relationship with pressure that fertility has finally exposed.

Fertility didn't create the perfectionism. It didn't create the need to control outcomes. It didn't create the belief that your worth is somehow tied to your performance. Those patterns were already there. Fertility simply became the place where they could no longer hide.

A few days before the laundry incident, I was talking with a client who felt guilty because clean clothes had been sitting around for a couple of days. There had even been some tension with her husband about it. As we were talking, I laughed because I was literally looking at my own pile of clean laundry sitting on the floor. I sent her a picture.

Not because I was trying to make a profound point, but because I wanted her to see that this is what normal life looks like. People get tired. People get overwhelmed. People leave things unfinished sometimes. Yet so many women have been conditioned to believe they should be able to maintain perfection while carrying the emotional weight of infertility, work, relationships, family, and life.

The truth is that the laundry isn't the problem. It never was. The problem is the emotional charge attached to the laundry. The anxiety. The guilt. The self-judgment. The story that starts running the second you notice it sitting there. That's the part most people spend their entire lives avoiding. Not the task itself, but the feeling the task creates.

And this is where so much of the personal development world loses me. We live in a culture obsessed with quick fixes. Everyone wants the quantum leap. Everyone wants the breakthrough. Everyone wants the manifestation technique that's going to change everything overnight.

But if I'm being honest, the biggest shifts in my life happened in the most boring ways imaginable. They happened because I stopped running from uncomfortable emotions. They happened because I sat with them. Again and again and again. Not once. Not for a weekend workshop. Not for thirty days. For years.

That's the part people don't want to hear. The people teaching transformation today can often make it sound simple because they've already spent years sitting in the fire. They've already sat through the boredom, the uncertainty, the grief, the fear, the shame, and the frustration. What looks like a quantum leap from the outside is usually the result of hundreds of tiny moments where someone chose not to run from themselves.

I see this in my own life now when I think about things I once believed were impossible. If you had told me ten years ago that I would someday be eating foods I was once terrified of, I would have laughed at you. I spent years following strict protocols. Years believing my body couldn't tolerate certain things. Years believing the answer was somewhere outside of me.

At that stage of my journey, I simply didn't have the awareness or capacity to consider that my relationship with my body might be part of the equation. Not because I wasn't smart enough. Not because I wasn't trying hard enough. I just wasn't there yet.

That's what awareness does. It expands your capacity to see things differently. Not all at once, but gradually. Layer by layer. Until one day you realize that something which used to completely consume you no longer has a grip on you. The situation may not even be different. What changed is your relationship to it.

Today, clean laundry on the floor means absolutely nothing to me. It's just clean laundry on the floor. There isn't a story attached to it. There isn't an identity attached to it. There isn't a judgment attached to it. And while that might sound like a silly example, it's actually one of the clearest signs of healing I know.

Because the goal was never to get the laundry done.

The goal was to stop making the laundry mean something about me.

And the same is true for so many things on the fertility journey. The real work isn't usually the thing you're looking at. It's the emotions, beliefs, and patterns attached to the thing you're looking at. Once those begin to soften, everything else starts to feel different too.

Not because you've become a different person.

Because you've finally stopped fighting yourself.

⚡️Most women don't need more fertility information. They need help seeing what's actually keeping them stuck. That's exactly what we help women uncover inside Finding Fertility.  

Let’s Do This Together 💚

Monica

Listen up, lovelies: Everything I share about health, diet, or fertility magic is my opinion. Yep, it’s all based on years of trial and error, study, reading, listening, and side-eyeing the nonsense out there. What worked for me might be a jackpot for you—or it might be a total flop. Bodies are weird like that. 🤷‍♀️

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not a doctor, nutritionist, dietitian, or any other kind of licensed health wizard. If you need medical advice, run—don’t walk—to an actual qualified professional. Don’t come back here saying Monique told you to eat kale for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, okay?

As for the products I mention, they’re either what I used during my own infertility rollercoaster or what I wish I’d known about back then. No guarantees, no promises, and absolutely no refunds on your hope budget if it doesn’t work out.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, proceed with curiosity and, above all, discernment. You’ve got this. 💪✨

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Full Transcript:

00:00
person that I used to be, I used to identify so hard, that I used to glorify. Look how amazing I am for taking on the world. Doing it all, showing up. The type A me would have never thrown clean laundry on the floor. So interesting how you can be so unaware of your life, of how you move and still get through the day.

00:28
But once you become aware and kind of start really seeing things as they truly are, you then start to wonder how the hell did I make it through those days? And you start to understand why you are possibly dealing with some of the health issues because you're so exhausted, even though it doesn't even feel like you're digging a ditch or

00:58
building a house or tending to a garden or like, you know, like hard labor. The hardest thing is being okay with the hardest thing. Like actually sitting in the thick of it, of the emotions you feel around the situation. The old me would have felt really guilty and lazy to have thrown clean clothes on the floor and not deal with them for 24 hours. And honestly,

01:26
I think I would have left them if it didn't remind me of a client session I had just a few days ago about a situation around clean clothes, then being left for two days. There was a little barney between the husband and the wife. You have all the time on your hands. Why are you not doing the laundry? And I had to send her a photo to say, this is like a hundred percent of people who have normal lives.

01:56
who don't have extra help around, like people who are like live in a house with just their partner and potentially their children. This is normal. And I think society would be so much better off if we just normalized not being perfect and having life around us as we go.

02:25
It doesn't mean we're not going to do it. I mean, this would have really got to me probably after three days. But the type A in me 10 years ago, 20 years ago, would have never. This would have been so unacceptable and I wouldn't have been able to do it because every cell in my body would have rejected it and it would have felt better.

02:53
to just do it, even though I didn't want to or, you know, whatever the reason. And I would have just done it. Where I can see now, because when you start living with true awareness of what's going inside your body, that that was just contributing to the utter chaos and BS in my life. I only got to this stage of life of giving less fucks.

03:21
about things that actually really don't matter and will get done eventually by sitting in it, by feeling that anxiety, that laziness, like whatever emotion comes up for you surrounding this, by actually just sitting it and feeling it again and again and again. Not just one time, probably just not 20 times, like months into years of changing that

03:51
pattern and feeling that emotion until you are just neutral, until you have zero judgment around leaving clean laundry on the floor for a little bit. That's how you get through what you want to change. We live in the society that says it needs to be quick. And when it comes to changing your life, there's no fucking quantum leaping.

04:21
All the gurus out there who say this is how you quantum leap spent years sitting in it. Sitting on a fucking park bench being bored or broke or unaware or like not knowing where they needed to go. The people who can manifest money out of their ass is because they sat in all the BS that was blocking them from the money. The people who teach

04:50
only can teach truly because they've sat in the fire, they've sat in the shit, they've sat in the uncomfortable emotion, they've done the work again and again and again. Not only in sessions or using modalities, but also in their mundane life. That's the way through. So them being able to then tell you it's as easy as this? Absolutely, it is. It's so much easier.

05:19
than anyone is willing to admit. But every cell in your body, if you can't sit with clean clothes on the floor for 24 hours or whatever your little thing that you need to control, and you can't sit with those emotions, there's no way that you are going to be able to show up.

05:45
in ways of manifestation because there's too much blocking you and it's not the fucking laundry. It's the emotion that you feel towards the laundry. It's the emotion and the experiences that are stored in every cell of your body, your fascia, your nervous system, your stories and your thoughts that literally you just make up in your brain.

06:14
Because when you start healing, I had a friend tell me once, I'm not gonna do that in a work right now because I wanna write my book. Which is ironic because she'll never write her book because of all the shit that's blocking her to show up for herself. But she knows, she intuitively knows the moment she starts healing her book is not gonna be as fiery as it could be. Because when you change the emotion and the energy connected to the event,

06:44
It's like it almost never happened. I mean, it happened, but you do not identify, you do not connect the same way you are now. Me 10 years ago would have all sorts of stories and emotions around clean laundry on the floor for more than 24 hours. Where the person I am now, I have no connection to this. I have no identity, I have no emotion. It just is.

07:12
And I know this is probably like a really silly example, but I mean, this is the truth. And the more you do that to the things that actually matter in life, whatever situation that you're dealing with now or that you have in the past, the more you stop avoiding the work that you know you're avoiding, it gets easier.

07:38
But it's not these quantum leaps. It only feels like a quantum leap when you have done the work, you then set your intention and you do your little modalities, whatever that might be, and you quantum leap into the next phase. Yeah, I do believe that can happen. But there's no way you would have told me 15 years ago, 20 years ago when I started my fertility journey, and that's what woke me up to what reality actually is.

08:07
It's taken a long time to get to the belief system that I can change my food intolerances through my emotions and being aware of how I show up to that food. No way. If you would have told me that 20, 15, 10, even five years ago, I wouldn't have been able to have the capacity or the belief system to believe that and then therefore try it and go.

08:36
Isn't that, huh? I spent 10 years being completely full-blown, AIP, autoimmune diet, super strict, could like almost eat nothing in a fucking restaurant. And now you're telling me that I just needed to deal with BS that wasn't even mine to begin with? And now I can eat lasagna again? So you have to go through these stages of awareness, of capacity to get to

09:04
listening to affirmations in theta state. I don't know why these bitches out there aren't telling you that. Consistently and then whoop.

09:18
No, you gotta sit with the clean clothes on probably a dirty floor. ain't gonna lie here.

09:27
And deal with those emotions first. Start with that. See how that works for you. Then you might be ready to actually tackle the bullshit blocking you. The grief, the resentment. So start. Start with clean clothes on a dirty floor.