Cervical Mucus: A Love Story

Ft. The Story of How I Started Using the Fertility Awareness Method

This is the first of my paid subscribers only content. It’s a more personal story. Paid content will be released monthly, with a companion discussion accessible only to paid subscribers.

Photo by Meredith Whitman.

There was a time in my life when I couldn’t feel my pulse.

I’d run my finger tip up and down my wrist, up and down my neck, unable to feel the subtle movement I knew I was supposed to find there. It was all blank. No matter how I tried I couldn’t locate the rhythmic beating of blood that told me I was alive.

And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t feel very alive at the time. Chronic illness will do that.¹ But it was also that I didn’t feel alive in my body. My brain was making its aliveness very painfully clear. I wasn’t enjoying the experiences my brain was providing (anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts) but there was no doubt it was active and alert.

My body though. At times it felt vegetative. I couldn’t find my pulse. I couldn’t access feeling in various parts of my body, particularly below the waist. They weren’t physically numb in the way your foot or hand might go numb. But my ability to take my awareness into those parts of my body was numb. Like blood being unable to reach your foot because you have your knee folded for too long, my awareness had been cut off from most of my body for so long I hardly noticed there wasn’t feeling there.

Except, that is, when I tried to do something that required feeling and awareness in my body.

It was at this time, when I couldn’t feel my pulse and I couldn’t feel my body, that I was trying to do fertility awareness “right.” I was trying to finally do it perfectly and use it for birth control, which I hadn’t yet done. I’d been ostensibly charting—the method for tracking provided by body—for several years but had yet to use the method to its full potential.

Because fertility awareness is about the body. It is by and for the experience of the body. And that was a place I didn’t live.