Photography by Lotte Van Raalte

A good friend of mine texted me the other morning to tell me she had news — "I'm pregnant," it read.

I've had a lot of practice in managing this involuntary heart pounding, stomach-drop reaction that accompanies every pregnancy announcement, be it from friends, colleagues or celebrities — why the latter affects me at all, is still confusing. What differs now is the intensity and recovery time. Although I'm unable to control the immediate physical freak out that goes on inside my body, I can steer, for the most part, how my brain processes the information. The fact that a pregnancy announcement can provoke any negative feeling at all, from a temporary bout of seething jealousy, to panic, depression, or even being knocked into a bed-coma, feels pretty messed up. But it turns out that it's perfectly common. It's like schadenfreude in reverse. Instead of feeling joy from someone else's pain, you feel pain from someone else’s joy. What kind of horrible, fucked-up person is wired that way? Some people who have been struggling to make a baby for years, that's who.

What used to play out like something from Pixar's Inside Out, was a handful of emotions trying to adjust to the information of a new pregnancy. A self-destructive team in my mind. Unlike the film, where Joy plays the lead role, Fear, Envy, Surprise and Indignation steal the show. But I've learned, from years of listening to people much wiser, to try and not be absorbed with personal upset, to not give my energy to comparison (so hard), because we are exactly where we need to be (apparently).

You can choose to distance yourself from social media pregnancy announcements, but a text, phone call, or an overjoyed friend confiding in you over coffee, can happen at any time. Of course you're happy for your friend — you're not an asshole. But yes, it's a bit more complicated. While another friend gets membership to the motherhood club you've been repeatedly denied access to, you're reminded that you're not pregnant on a day you were otherwise not reeling over that. So it's going to stir up some stuff.

"a confusing combination of happy for her/crap for me"

From my experience, text announcements have been easier to deal with. I've greatly appreciated friends who understand that their announcement has a bitter/sweet affect on some. They've saved me from the face-to-face awkwardness where I have to dig deep for school production drama skills to detract from my terrible poker face. One friend told me over FaceTime. Which in theory was lovely, but I had to keep ducking out of frame to wipe away tears, so on top of feeling a confusing combination of happy for her/crap for me, I also felt like a crappy friend. The out-of-the-blue baby scan was a bit much, given where I was that day (we'd received bad news from the embryologist). The resulting stomach-drop moment, made me acutely aware that my uterus was barren unlike hers. So a text gets my vote. That way you can sit with your emotions for a bit, and then congratulate her.

I hate that I feel anything other than absolute joy for someone who's pregnant — especially a friend. It's a really confusing bag of emotions to hold when you've been on this road for so long, hoping it's your turn to say, "I'm pregnant!" Rather than always saying "congratulations." I realised the other day that, depressingly, the only time "congratulations" is directed my way is when I get an email from my cycle studio to say that I’ve been allocated a space from the waitlist.

So if you want to sit and sulk, if you feel you can't see your pregnant friend for a bit, I hear you. Hell, I've been there. I've just found that not being hard on myself and being happy for them works better for me. Believing that someday it will be my day, I'll get to bond with a friend over morning sickness, cankles, and hypnobirthing. Then I pull the emergency chord and revel in what I won't be able to do when I am pregnant: I eat sushi, exercise excessively, roll around naked in unpasteurised dairy, and take a hot tub and sauna with a shot of tequila.