Fertility Craze
Hi Crazy Beautiful Reader,
I’m so happy to announce that an essay I’ve been working on for a few years was published today in a literary magazine called “Into the Void.”
The essay chronicles a manic episode I suffered a few years ago triggered by the fertility hormones I used to freeze my eggs.
While much has been written about the benefits and opportunities of egg freezing—allegedly a life-changing fertility intervention for women—very little has been documented about the psychological effects of this practice.
I’d be so grateful if you’d check it out and let me know what you think (you can reply directly to this email). And please forward this newsletter along to anyone you think would appreciate it.
xo,
Michele Faye
Read the full essay here.
Excerpt:
There’s something about egg freezing that feels like an expensive act of defiance: you refuse to be a slave to your biology. Another part of it punctuates your sense of loneliness and failure. Like maybe if you hadn’t dumped that college boyfriend because he was too clingy, you’d be out to dinner with your doting husband on a Saturday night instead of injecting yourself with thousands of dollars of hormones before hooking up with a stranger you met on a dating app.
But the pursuit of prolonged fertility isn’t a superficial process. You don’t hand the doctors thousands of dollars one morning and, after an uncomplicated procedure, leave the building with a bunch of microscopic eggs that, for a monthly storage fee, stay tucked away in a freezer. It means supplemental hormone injections that put the body and mind through a significant ordeal. There’s a substantial gap in research on how the hormonal measures women take to get pregnant using In Vitro Fertilization or egg freezing influence mental health. The field is still new. And this is what I came up against in my own experience of egg freezing.