When Your Life Is Overfilled and You Haven't Even Noticed: Creating Space During IVF
I have a tendency to rush between things, fly towards shiny objects like a magpie, and not come up for air until it's too late.
For a long time I didn't even clock that this was a pattern. I thought it was just how I was wired, the price of being someone who cares about doing good work. It wasn't until things became unsustainable that I looked at it honestly and realised the problem wasn't the pace. It was that I'd never once stopped to notice the pace was a problem.
If you're going through IVF right now and trying to hold your career together at the same time, I'd put money on the fact that you know exactly what I'm describing. Not because you're disorganised or struggling or doing it wrong. Because fertility treatment drops into an already full life and asks you to absorb it without telling anyone, or anyone truly understanding. You're injecting in toilet cubicles, rearranging meetings around scan appointments, sitting in a clinic at 7am and presenting to senior stakeholders by 9. And all of it happens in a life that was already full before any of this started.
The advice you'll usually get at this point is to practise self-care. Take a bath, do some yoga or a breathwork session, get out in nature. I’m not saying those aren’t good things to do, they' most definitely are, but they aren’t the real answer.
What I've come to understand, both from going through IVF myself and from coaching women navigating fertility treatment alongside demanding careers, is that the issue runs deeper than that. It's not that women going through IVF don't know how to rest. It's that they haven't yet noticed their life is overfilled, or if they have noticed, they haven't decided that's something they're allowed to change.
That noticing is where everything starts.
It sounds almost too simple to be the thing, but in my experience, it's exactly the thing. The moment a woman going through fertility treatment looks at her life clearly and thinks, this is too much, and I deserve something different, something shifts. Not in her calendar or her workload, and not immediately, but in what she believes she's entitled to ask for.
Creating space during IVF doesn't have to look dramatic. For me*, this week, it looked like stopping work ten minutes before I needed to leave the house rather than sprinting out of the door with my shoes half on. It looked like a walk in the woods with my Labrador and coffee and carrot cake in the garden afterwards. A phone call with a friend I'd been putting off for weeks for no reason other than I was ‘too busy’. Small, ordinary, easy to dismiss.
Those little things are pretty powerful though. When you're going through fertility treatment and trying to maintain your career at the same time, they build resilience. Not the white-knuckle, push-through, keep on being strong kind. The kind that comes from tending to yourself, observing your life and noticing what you need, so that when the hard weeks arrive, and they will, you have something left. You're not running on empty when the result comes in. You're not falling apart in a meeting because you've been holding everything together so tightly for so long that the smallest thing tips you over.
The women I work with often arrive having done the opposite of this for months, sometimes years. So focused on holding their careers together during treatment that they've stopped noticing the cost. One of the most consistent shifts I see in coaching isn't a bold career move or a difficult conversation with a manager, though both of those happen too. It's permission. Permission to take up space. To slow down slightly without catastrophising about what it means for their career. To stop performing and pretending you’re fine and start actually being okay.
IVF is hard enough. Your career during IVF is a whole separate challenge that most workplaces are nowhere near equipped to help you with. The pressure you're under is real, and it is a lot.
So if you want help to figure out how to navigate it all without losing yourself in the process, that's what I'm here for. There’s also a workbook here that will be useful to help you focus on creating the life you want during, not in spite of, IVF.
Feel free to email me at jen@jenniferelworthy.co.uk or book a free call with me here.
*to clarify, I’m not having IVF at the moment, I’m speaking from experience and from a very full life at the moment.
