52+: Going Back to Move Forward (A Nudge Within a Nudge)

By Sarah Chamberlin, Guest Nudger

Conventional wisdom and popular themes on time pepper our collective speech. They can even intrude conversation as generic moral directives. “You can’t go back, you can only go forward” is one that comes to mind. “The present is the only thing we truly have” is another, often accompanied by the staunch inference that engaging with anything but is somehow erroneous.

These conventional sound bites pique my curiosity, as my relationship with time has been tested and even fractured in some places over the years. I had my future go black, as many trauma survivors do, for almost four years following my final failed fertility treatment. The all-encompassing nature of my motherhood losses lodged me strictly into the present. And a few years later, so would a glacially resolving chronic illness. My bandwidth for anything past tense has been mostly absent.

Absent until about a year ago, when the concept of going back in order to gain a clearer direction forward began to organically surface for me. A “you need to know where you’ve been to see where you’re going” sort of beckoning. I was tempted to dabble, and as a result, my perspective on time was about to be challenged in ways new and different for me.

As an Aquarian, and thus innately forward-thinking by nature, looking back has never been my thing. The act of curating one’s past is definitely outside of my natural wheelhouse. And it sure takes extra labor in cases where one’s current path has been fraught with one loss and/or crisis after another.

My original nudge was to foray into my more recent past by re-reading my blog Infertility Honesty. I began writing as a form of self-therapy. For me it was a means of emotional survival, creating a small offset to the smothering societal silencing and social snubs encountered by assisted reproductive technology patients. In 2013, I came forward on the brink of ending fertility treatments without a child to non-anonymously share my raw experiences in real time at Infertility Honesty.

In the years to come, I’d traverse the dark night of the soul, go on multiple internal odysseys, and field additional hardships. Through it all, writing was always by my side. The early 2020s found a transformed Sarah with more to offer and ready for change. And so I launched Afterward Honesty Yoga in 2021, a platform that features my long-dreamed-of yoga offerings for those who find themselves permanently childless-not-by-choice.

Not every transition in life is a neat, clipped epiphany though; in fact, most of them aren’t. And this one has proven as much. The continued set-up and tweaking of Afterward Honesty Yoga was part of my call to re-read my first online platform.

When I was writing Infertility Honesty, my not-looking-back tendencies were alive and well. After posting a piece, I’d be right on to the next thing undone by infertility and childlessness I had to relearn (and thus write about!). The pile was endless. And, being that I was in the throes of trauma and trauma recovery simultaneously for much of it, my memory of what I had written was poor.

Upon nudging myself to re-read it recently, I ran into quite the serving of resistance. I mean, wasn’t living through and surviving it all enough? How will I handle being the reader of my own story?

My envisioned reading space of calm, cocooning, and reflecting was swapped out for a “get it done in bits and pieces” approach amid the backdrop of my currently unsettled life. But that didn’t stop me from re-reading Infertility Honesty in its entirety. Nor did it stop the emergence of a multifaceted hodgepodge of rich and useful perspectives.

Going back to read my blog settled some personal things for me. Though I had my doubts prior, I was able to see that, years into the blog, I had actually written pretty from the liminal space that comes after grief and trauma fueled “survival writing” ebbs.

My re-read also affirmed I had done the right thing by moving forward, conflicted though that may feel for me at times. I now have different needs knocking and gnawing in my life. Shifting direction is my attempt to meet them.

There were also some broader points going back illuminated for me.

The resistance I felt prior to this nudge? Totally justified. The far-reaching weight of my own story got to me at times. It’s quite the sobering one to read. It was cringey bearing witness to the wisps of optimism I had at different points in my process, entirely unaware of the ominous obstacles that lay ahead. Connecting with my story would often bring a weighted darkness that would stay with me for hours after. This served as a reminder: It’s not the presence of resistance that matters. It’s our noticing of it, how we lean into it (should we choose to do so), and how we listen to what it’s trying to tell us that is key.

On the other hand, I was able to see that my blog was also chock-full of humor and wisdom. I do often feel humorous, but wise is not something I feel on any sort of a regular basis. And wise is actually the last thing you feel when your entire life and worldview have been dropped into a blender set on high. Your other vibrant qualities don’t register much either in the early years of grief, and often later too, as the unlearning and relearning continue. It was nice to be able to enjoy myself upon re-reading in ways that I couldn’t when I was writing and processing my lived experiences.

As a writer, I often feel like a conduit, however I don’t believe in a higher power that knows better. But perhaps that’s the place where humor and wisdom are born—from that universal space of having been unwittingly torn down and forced to swim in the cluelessness of it all.  

I’m now able to offer myself even greater doses of self-compassion than I would have otherwise. Reading about my trials and crises of the last decade-plus has driven home just how onerous it has all been. In a way living it day to day interestingly cannot.

I marvel that I’m even in a place where I have the space to integrate my recent past. I was able to put the past and the future aside, though, upon reading the last few sentences of my last formal post. In that moment, which hung poignant in the air, I had only one thing to say to myself. “Congratulations. Job well done” reverberated through me then and in the hours to follow.

This is where ideally things should end, but alas I’m not one to say no to riding out a theme for all it’s worth! “Going back to move forward” also ended up permeating other areas of my life. Reviewing my recent past seemed to clear some channels, allowing me to loop back even further.

In my “old life,” as I call it, before infertility, I was a flutist. I had to let go of my wedding music business and eventually stop teaching lessons due to the rigors and ramifications of fertility treatments and their related losses. Going back to music remained unenvisionable following treatments, too. Front and center were my emotional and psychological woundedness coupled with my resolve to find footing in this new life I hadn’t asked for.

Until one day. I got the opportunity to teach again and, for the first time in nine years, I thought, “That would be fine. I’d like to do that, and I’m ready to do that again.”

So an unexpected mini-safari back in time began, with me practicing my flute again, and touring all of my old repertoire, and having techniques I once vigorously studied float back. I began teaching flute again and having my teaching methods resurface. I was awestruck that after everything, this was all still in me somewhere, as if tucked away in an airtight vault ready to be retrieved at a moment’s notice.

But even more to the point, this journey back to my thirty-something self offered me the opportunity, for the first time, for the person I’ve been forced to become to interface with the person I was before infertility. My thirty-something flutist self evolved to embrace my now-expanded levels of perception, compassion, and humility, and I see how much she offer.

I’ve also recently spent some time in the town where I lived and worked upon graduating college. Which is also the town where my husband and I got together a bunch of years later. A few dinners out and walks around town brought me face to face with my badass, determined-beyond-measure twenty-something self.

And then there was a visit and short ride though my childhood hometown. Groton, Massachusetts, is four hours and a few states away from where I am now. It’s also an entirely different world from where I chose to embark on my adult life. Traveling through had my current self clicking back in with my independent-dreamer-adolescent self. And my sweet, introverted younger self.

What did all of these younger versions of me have in common? They all had dreams, ambitions, passions, struggles, and heartbreaks underlined by a spirited sense of self. In addition to that, they all were sure they’d be a mother one day. No one and nothing had ever suggested the possibility of otherwise. And so for years I avoided making connection with all of these Sarahs. Coming up close to the different versions of me who thought they’d have children was just too painful.

And with life indifferently picking me up and flinging me onto an unexpected, entirely unprescribed course, older versions of me were just quite frankly not relevant for a good long time. Or useful in any way either.

This bout of going back—further back than my recent past—to move forward was a poignant surprise that taught me a lot.

I was able to see in a different light that disconnecting from older versions of yourself is understandable and sometimes necessary. And that re-integrating these older versions of yourself, though not compulsory, is a legitimate piece of the healing mystery. But perhaps only when you’re called to do so, and only if you find yourself darned good and ready.

And in terms of all parts of my past, recent and otherwise, I realized I wasn’t going back exactly. I was reconnecting back. For me this re-integration has been eye opening, grounding, and has amplified my feelings of wholeness.

Like many people coming from any life-altering loss, in the years coming out of fertility treatments, I felt as though every part of me except my body had died. The dearest revelation from all versions of my reconnecting back was learning that I had actually been here all along. It’s okay that I wasn’t aware of this; unsolicited change and injury propels our attention elsewhere for a good long time. I now wonder, though, whenever I end up looking back on my entire life, if my years-long trip from that empty sarcophagus state to my current state of forever-altered and ever-evolving wholeness won’t be the thing I’m most proud of.  

Given what conventional wisdom has to say about time, well, I can safely say my views have been expanded. “You can’t go back, you can only go forward,” “The present is the only thing we truly have,” and the like—these compartmentalized soundbites are too narrow for me.

Past, present, and future, they are all relevant, to varying degrees at varying times in our lives. Each of these aspects of time are capable of being wounded too. Ideally if our relationship with them, or with whatever aspects might be available to us at any given time, is going to be healthy and functional, it needs to be fluid. Fluid and nonpreferential.

I have no doubt this deeper connection to all phases of my past and my relative selves will be an important ingredient in compassing my path forward.

As far as my next, long-awaited, seemingly forever percolating chapter ahead? I’m now ready to go. All of me.

As Sarah prepares to launch Afterward Honesty Yoga, she is seeking people who are permanently involuntarily childless to test her booking system. In exchange for your help and feedback, she’s offering free virtual group and one-to-one yoga sessions! If you’re interested, contact Sarah directly at sarahafterwardhonesty@gmail.com. While Sarah is not taking formal bookings until 2024, feel free to visit and take a look at the new Afterward Honesty Yoga here.