In 2023, I thought a lot about eggs

Published on 13 December 2023

Soft boiled and dippy.

Sunny side up.

Scrambled. Buttery, salty, and creamy.

Oocyte. Egg cell. Ovum. 

My own eggs inside of me. 

2023 was the year I froze them. And this is the story of fertility and false empowerment. 

Society classifies me as an empowered woman. I have the privilege of being well-educated, of having chosen to leave my home country, of having been able to make a home for myself in several other places over the years. I’ve held down good jobs at enviable places to work. I have the means to be able to live alone. I am free to vote, dress, love in the ways I choose, and I can speak freely. I am empowered. 

Recently, my employer gave me the opportunity to freeze my eggs. I’m in my early thirties and I’m not at a point where I’m ready to have children, or make a decision about whether I even want to. So, making the decision to go ahead and freeze my eggs felt like an empowering one. In theory, I am giving myself more options for the future. In theory, I’m taking control – as much as it’s possible to ‘control’ fertility.  

A smart, sensible, forward-thinking, empowering choice on paper. But in reality, the process – which has been arduous and gruelling on my mind and body – has felt far from empowering. In reality, I have not felt like I am in control. 

Navigating the process has been overwhelming from the start. I’ve had so many questions. How do I choose a reputable clinic? Can I trust it to treat me gently and with care while putting my body through something so invasive? How honestly have they represented themselves and their successes?

Once I’d chosen a clinic, the old set of questions were replaced with a new one. Did I make the right choice? Why do I never see the same person? What’s this White Coat’s name? And then once we were done with the initial checks, how could I prepare my body for optimum egg harvesting? 

It turned out there’s a huge amount to consider. Things to stop. Things to start. Take the vitamins. Book in some acupuncture. No stress. No runs. No high intensity exercise. Gently, gently. Be sure to not crack or squish the eggs before they’re ready to harvest. 

Cut the caffeine. Cull the drinking. 

Egg whites in whiskey sours.

The process itself takes a few weeks. Preparing for it was all-consuming, every single day for months. And if you do everything right, you might begin to feel the eggs growing inside. Ovaries full of caviar follicles. The scans show you, 7 or 8 on each side, each one to two centimetres in size. 

At times, I’ve felt like an egg-laying lizard, lying under heat lamps during acupuncture appointments. It’s meant to be good for stimulating circulation and helping increase your egg count. The more they can collect, the better.

Fishing nets gathering frogspawn.

More questions. Am I going to be a hormonal mess? How might I manage my emotions? Oh, and how do I explain this all to the new person I am dating? Or anyone, for that matter? 

“Hi. Just to warn you, me and my body are preparing for my eggs to be harvested and my emotions may be volatile over the next few weeks. But please, if you feel the urge to leave me, could you wait a little while because breaking up would upset me and it may risk how many eggs the White Coat is able to collect. Sorry to ask. I am actually an empowered woman, it’s just I have no power over the success of the impending egg harvest despite having made an extremely empowered decision (on paper) and I really would not like to fuck this up.” 

My brain was full of ova and every egg reminded me of what I was going through. 

Cream egg gloop.

Tobiko atop sushi.

Caviar jewels.

Coddled slop.

The people with wombs I have spoken to about this could empathise. They too have had to think about the time limitations on our fertility. The pressure to prepare, just in case. 

The people without wombs, not so much. 

“Want me to put that box of half a dozen in the freezer for you?” 

“You got 13? Could make a decent-sized cake.” 

Jokes cracked by well-meaning men but awkward in their inability to relate. The difference between these conversations was stark. 

Whipped stiff peaks.

When my time came for my precious bounty to be extracted from me, I was the goose with the golden eggs. The process was largely successful. But after it all, I just felt drained. My clinic reached out to me for a follow-up chat. My acupuncturist asked me how it all went. I avoided responding to them for months. I needed time to process what I’d been through. I needed to come to terms with how it had affected me.

Because it really did affect me.

I made a decision that I thought was right for me – a decision that the modern, liberal society that I am proudly part of holds up as being empowering for women. But the anxiety and the emotional admin and the lifestyle restrictions and the extreme fatigue and the heightened emotions and the fear of those intense emotions being detrimental to the process, hasn’t felt empowering. It has felt like more shit that people with wombs have to go through if they have the opportunity to choose to freeze their eggs. 

And if we do choose this, the reality is all of this proactive, empowered decision-making might come to nothing, because even as we try to exert some control over the situation, it’s not in our control at all. 

That’s just what it is. It’s biological. It’s what we have to deal with as people with wombs, regardless of whether we may or may not want children. 

All I’ve thought about this year is eggs. Though I’m glad I froze some of mine, I don’t want to do it again any time soon.