All products featured on Self are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

“Do you know when you’re ovulating?” Liz asked, our chairs swiveled to face each other in the open-concept workspace. “Like, can you feel it?”

In that moment I realized not only did I have the wrong answer, but I was utterly baffled by the question.

Tim and I had been trying to get pregnant for a few months, and I had shared our baby-making plans with Liz—with lots of friends—openly, excitedly, unthinkingly, because I was confident that it would happen for us eventually. “Uh, I absolutely cannot feel it,” I said with a jokey lightheartedness that in no way reflected how I really felt.

Liz didn’t necessarily seem surprised, but she told me she could feel it. Unequivocally. Our friend Vickie walked by and joined the conversation; she could feel it too. What was anyone even talking about? The notion of feeling ovulation had never so much as occurred to me. Was it like a snowflake gliding? A pinball rolling? An innocuous ache? The teensiest twitch? Apparently, unbeknownst to me, knowing when one was ovulating was the most obvious thing in the world. I decided it was time to pay attention.

In the handful of months since I’d stopped taking birth control, my periods had become increasingly irregular, which made nailing down my ovulation window significantly more challenging than Liz and Vickie had implied. But that was ok, I would take matters into my own hands. Sitting pants-less on an examining table, white paper crinkling beneath my bare butt, I listened to an ob-gyn recommend acupuncture as a first-line method to regulate my cycle and assist in conception. “Anecdotally,” she said, “it can sometimes help get things going.”

Within days there were dozens of acupuncture needles pierced through the skin of my belly, each silver spear its own question—hello? anyone there?—to which my inner matter responded with a microscopic spasm, again and again, like the sensation of fingers snapping drilled down to the head of a pin. Yes, here! I felt more in control of my body than I had in months.

In those early days of trying, as I engaged in month after month of cycle-charting, ovulation test-taking, and acupuncture-poking, followed by a few nights of strategically scheduled sex, I began to feel my body slip away from me. I pictured my active external self—31-years-old, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed after a run—as fraudulent, housing a lifeless reproductive system within, a bunch of defunct organs clustered in the shadows, collecting cobwebs. The trust between my body and me, so implicit I’d never noticed it, eroded at the precise moment I became aware of its existence.

Once I reached the required-yet-maddening 12 months of trying unsuccessfully for my fertility to be officially assessed, I showed up for an appointment with my ob-gyn. She shared that I was not ovulating consistently, and when I was, my egg was not of strong enough quality to become a baby. But that was no problem; I could take a drug called Clomid to strengthen my eggs and normalize the frequency with which they were released.

Several months on Clomid passed and I still wasn’t pregnant, so I graduated to intrauterine insemination, or IUI, a procedure where Tim’s sperm would be injected into me. We tried that a few times without success before graduating to the big leagues: in vitro fertilization. During my first round of IVF, I gave up coffee and alcohol in hopes of producing the strongest embryos and healthiest pregnancy possible.

I felt clean and virtuous—was I starting to resemble an enlightened yogi? or possibly even Gwyneth Paltrow?—sipping lemon water and hot herbal tea, mentally clear and physically buoyant despite the 19 rapidly growing eggs jostling for space among my reproductive organs. I turned 33 over the course of that first round—still so young—and I remained convinced that this baby was close, just ever so slightly beyond my reach. If I only tried things just a little bit differently, I would get it all under control.

The nurse’s call came on a Monday morning. I wasn’t pregnant. The entire world seemed to collapse around me.

In the days and weeks afterward, once I’d steadied myself, I realized there was only one thing to do next: try harder. When we resumed treatment, giving up booze and caffeine would be the least of my efforts, I vowed. This time, to wrest total control over my body, I would go full Gwyneth; I would give up sugar and soy and dairy and non-whole grains. I switched to “natural” beauty products. I purged our apartment of harsh cleaning agents that might be interfering with my endocrine system and messing with my hormones. I continued to go to acupuncture. I drank teas to support fertility and ate bee pollen to fortify my reproductive organs. I exercised, but gently, resting in between. I did yoga, channeling intention and positive energy into my fertility. I tried Reiki, a form of energy healing, and gua sha, where skin is scraped with a special tool to improve circulation. On one occasion my acupuncturist inserted needles with miniature herb bundles at the top, and then lit them on fire in an ancient form of heat therapy called moxibustion. I rode the subway home smelling like I’d just gotten stoned, but I didn’t care. I would do, try, sacrifice anything.

I felt sure this inner cleansing would be the thing to make the difference but somehow, nothing happened. We did IVF again and again and again and again. Four brutal rounds, six agonizing months. Not one thing I ate or drank or eliminated or attempted made a single difference. My body wouldn’t budge. I was desperate for control. I felt entitled to control. Who was in charge of this body if not me? I was doing everything “right”, but for the first time in my life, no amount of will or effort could produce the outcome I wanted.

My body had failed me. Though in the end, it felt as if I was the failure.

For all my hope and effort and sacrifice, I eventually came to accept that I wasn’t going to Goop my way through this thing. The wellness machine would not deliver on its glossy promises, there was no perfect playbook, no magical set of practices that would persuade my body to bend to my will. The complete Goop-ification of my life had not provided control, as I’d believed it would, but merely the illusion of it.

Its undoing, however, offered something far more real: a chance to feel like myself again. In each one of a million everyday choices—the familiar bliss of caffeinated coffee, the straightforward joy of sushi with white rice, sloshed through regular old soy sauce, the daily moisturizer I’d used forever—I rediscovered the contours of myself. At a time when so much of my existence was unrecognizable, returning to those tiny, familiar pillars of daily life was a sort of homecoming.

It was a wedding in the Florida panhandle that reunited me with Publix fried chicken, possibly the un-Goopiest thing you can imagine and one of this planet’s most profound pleasures. The enjoyment of that drumstick, directly out of the cardboard box, my fingertips slick with grease, was so monumental, a friend pulled out her phone to record me eating it. The video shows a woman dimmed by grief, distorted by synthetic hormones, hungry for comfort, for a reminder of the person she’d once been. I wasn’t quite sure how, but I hoped with time and some luck, I might someday find a way to be that person again.

Excerpt adapted from YOU MAY FEEL A BIT OF PRESSURE by Amy Gallo Ryan, published by Unsolicited Press. © 2025 Amy Gallo Ryan. Reprinted with permission from Unsolicited Press.