Trigger warning: miscarriage, grief

I’m not great at sitting still with pain. I’ve always been the kind of person who needs to move through it, do something with it. And right now, that something is writing. Because I had a miscarriage, and my world stopped. Eight and a half weeks, a heartbeat, and then gone.

We saw that flicker on the screen, and I felt something shift, like my body was finally on my side. For years, I’ve been an unforgiving athlete, criticizing it for being too big, too small, not healing fast enough, never enough. But through this fertility journey, I started learning to trust it. I told myself when the timing was right, it would work. I really believed it.

And then suddenly, it didn’t. Miscarriage. A word that feels clinical and cruel, one that doesn’t come close to describing the way it tears through your body and rearranges your sense of safety. It’s the kind of pain that exists in layers, physical, emotional, hormonal, all crashing at once.

I’ve been through hard things before. Losing my mom was the worst thing that ever happened to me. That grief gutted me. My body carried me through it, step by step, even when my heart didn’t want to. But losing this baby has been its own kind of heartbreak. It’s not the same grief, but it echoes. It hurts differently, deeper in the body somehow, like a quiet ache that follows you everywhere.

My body has carried me through so much: the mat, the Army, surgeries, training, loss. It’s endured every kind of pain and still found ways to stand back up. But nothing has leveled me like this. There’s no plan for how to recover. No training cycle. No checklist. Just this crash, hormones dropping, emotions all over the place, and an anger I didn’t expect.

I’m mad. Mad that this happened, mad at how random it feels, mad that I finally trusted my body and it couldn’t hold on. And then that old voice shows up, the one that says maybe I did something wrong, maybe I wasn’t enough. I’m learning to fight back against that voice. To remind myself that biology isn’t judgment, that this isn’t punishment.

People ask what helps, and the truth is there’s no formula. There’s heat and Advil, time off when your body demands it, the quiet kindness of people who show up without trying to fix it. There’s grief that comes in waves, anger that shows up without warning, and tiny moments of stillness that feel like breathing again.

This isn’t a guide or a plea for sympathy. It’s just the truth. Loss can be ordinary and still enormous. You can be grateful for what you have and still be broken by what you’ve lost.

If you’ve been through this, I see you. If you love someone who’s grieving, be there in the small ways, text, drop off something warm, say you’re sorry, don’t try to make it better.

This is me naming the hurt so it can be held. I’m learning to love my body again, even in this. I don’t know how long it takes to feel like myself again, but I know my body has carried me through every storm so far, and I trust it will again. <3