How Chrissy Teigen Helped me Grieve my Miscarriage
I was scrolling Twitter before bed a few weeks back when I saw that Chrissy Teigen was leaving the hospital without her baby.
My wishful little brain thought, maybe the baby is in the NICU, or with a nurse, my fear of my own trauma making me unable to confront the reality that is pregnancy loss. But there was that nagging question in the back of my mind, if the baby is okay, then why would they send the mama home so soon? I decided to dig deeper, so I went to Instagram and clicked through to her profile. That’s when I saw a devastating picture of her crying in a hospital bed. It was the kind of picture so striking that you cannot look away, it just feels wrong to do so. Allowed into this intimate moment by a stranger, it felt like my responsibility to see her. I went back to her Twitter, reading her Tweet again in an attempt to make sense of the tragedy. I spent the next hour or so scrolling, reading comments, searching for meaning, feeling comfort each time someone comforted her and feeling pain each time I looked back at her images. I felt rage when people compared pregnancy loss to abortion, trying to leverage a woman’s right to choose against another woman’s loss for political gain. I felt sadness each time someone chastised her, a celebrity, for the striking image that seared into my heart, as though the condition of celebrity precludes one from grief. I felt so confused. I was looking to make it make sense, knowing full well that tragedy never makes sense.
Coming off the reality of my own miscarriage just 8 weeks ago, I was hoping to find solace in her grief, a sense of communion, or perhaps in her grieving so publicly, some permission for my grief to come out of the shadows.
At that point I fell into a deeper internet rabbit hole, where more and more people reshared Teigen’s experience on their own pages in order to demean her grief, her experience, and to call into question her decision to share with her followers the card she had been dealt. I was struck that the very people who often share in celebrity celebrations felt empowered by the witnessing of suffering via social media to decree that space as inappropriate for her sadness. There were those criticizing her for posting images of sorrow and, following quickly, the posts criticizing others for criticizing Chrissy Teigen. That’s when my emotional brain shifted and my scholarly brain turned on.
I’ve spent the last decade studying media and trauma, specifically why it is we turn to social media in our times of suffering when we otherwise view these spaces as trivial or commodified spaces where we curate just a portion of our persona for public consumption. But media scholars have long said that there is not a clean line between who we are online and who we are offline. Given the realities of our current socially distanced moment, we turn even more into our social media to negotiate who we are and how we fit into the world. It is in this process of going online that we are helping to produce the very culture that we attempt to fit into. We all know by now that social media platforms, from Twitter to Instagram, are not one thing for any of us. At times they are spaces of community and comfort, finding those with like minds or experiences to give us empathy or care. Other times they are spaces where we go to laugh, to make fun of the various ins and outs of our daily existence. For others, at times, they are highly curated spaces of performance where we represent ourselves according to the trends and norms that dominate our feeds. We go online when we are happy. We also go online when we are sad. And even if we can’t articulate why it is we do this, despite the algorithms beckoning us back to our favorite social media, there are many reasons we post.
Popular culture is not a static object and as we figure ourselves into it through our digital platforms we also produce it, shift it and set the boundaries around what can be considered normal in our social world. Often, our posts strike a nerve, they veer just far enough outside of the already socially agreed upon conventions of normal, but we still post them for a reason.
We post when we have something to say, from the trivial, to the joyful, to the devastating, we are posting in order to express our voice. We are trying to assert our story in the big circulation of stories that matter in this world, trying to express that our voice matters. Media scholar, Nick Couldry goes so far as to say that “giving an account of oneself and what affects one’s life — is an irreducible part of what it means to be human” and that effectively having your voice heard is a “human good.” This process is complicated enough during times of relative stability, but in times of trauma, the ability to narrate your reality and to make meaning from your suffering is crucial.
When we are traumatized our worlds stop making sense, and the assumptions we use to structure our daily lives also stop making sense. According to psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman this intense vulnerability cannot be fully be accounted for by our preexisting assumptions about the world and our place in it. So, generally, we then do one of two things. Sometimes we reframe what happened to us in ways that can make it fit within our assumptions, i.e. we give it a reason, we attribute meaning to the event. Yet, if the event is too traumatic, too severe to fit within our ways of understanding the world, we break apart as do our world-making assumptions. The hope of new life stunted by the inexplicable ways our bodies behave is really hard to make sense of, its just one of those things that doesn’t make sense.
My research into communities that grieve or process trauma online has shown that over and over again, when people’s trauma is too large that it breaks open their way of living in a normal world, they try to create new worlds to exist in. Not physical worlds, but new, flexible, forgiving cultural spaces where the boundaries of normal or conventional behavior can be tested, pushed, or outright ignored. Often, these spaces are digital, social media spaces. The suffering that seems so unrecognizable we cannot even fathom putting the pain into words, we capture in images, with captions and hashtags that seek to make space for that suffering to exist. We find others who have suffered like us and their looking at us can make us feel seen. We want to be seen, we want to be heard, we want to know that our voice matters.
When I saw my baby’s heartbeat at 8 weeks, I made all kinds of assumptions that helped me understand what my body was going through in pregnancy. I assumed I would go to the next appointment, and the one after that, I even made all the appointments. Just the day before I started drafting this my calendar reminded me of what would have been a 16-week checkup. I didn’t tell many people what had happened, that the little fetus had failed to survive and that that little heartbeat had quit beating just weeks after we first saw it flutter across a screen. Just after it happened, I closed myself off from the world. The world that insisted on continuing forward despite the pain I was in, despite the irreconcilability of my loss with the assumptions everyone seemed to be using to guide their day to day lives.
The assumptions that tell us what is normal left no room for my suffering.
The great theorist and writer, Stuart Hall, once wrote that what is popular in popular culture is a terrain of struggle, a struggle over what meanings get made and what meanings get valued in society. I felt that this loss was too taboo to share, too hidden away, too stigmatized by silence. In the struggle for meaning, this felt too far outside what I was allowed to share. So, I withdrew. But, despite the palpable crush of sadness and empathy I experienced when I saw Chrissy Teigen’s post, that picture of her loss made me less alone and I felt a tiny bit of myself was suddenly seen.
The next day, I saw another tweet that seemed to want to shame her for taking pictures of her pain, it asked her why she would want to remember her suffering. This question seemed to deny the truth that pain does not go away because we don’t look back on it. Just as people share online to be seen in grief and to feel less alone, they take pictures to carve out space for their new reality in an unforgiving world.
The day I went to the hospital to get my D&C, I took pictures. I took pictures of my big curly hair, of my mask that read “optimism,” of the familiar IV and hospital bracelet tangling past each other. I knew this scene because I’d spent a good amount of time in hospitals when I had a brain tumor. And just like I did then, on this day I marked the moments, gave them meaning, trying not to lose the last moments of hope before they were eclipsed by loss. I recorded the most devastating and challenging chapters of my life and when I look back on those images, I don’t see pain. I see grief, I see suffering, but I see me, navigating my life. I didn’t share the images of the D&C because, unlike images of my brain tumor, I was too scared that even in making meaning out of my suffering by sharing, that it would be too much for the normal feeds we all consume on Instagram, Twitter and the like. But looking at Chrissy Teigen’s post, I wish I had.
When we are brave enough to share the reality of suffering, we can foster space for new meanings to reset the boundaries of what is normal. We have always made our realities, at least in part, online. So why not normalize the entirety of the human experience? As of this writing, Chrissy Teigen’s IG post has 11.3 million likes. 11.3 million people have engaged in this meaning making process alongside her. In showing us her reality, starkly and without shame she allowed so many people to stop struggling over why their experience didn’t fit within the world, and for just a moment, at least for me, there was comfort in that. Thank you, for sharing, and I hope that as you heal from this loss, you continue to help make a world that makes room for all of our experiences — from joy to sadness.
