There is a particular kind of suffering that comes with infertility that has very little to do with the treatments themselves.

It is not the injections or the procedures or the waiting rooms. It is what happens in the quiet hours in between. The way hope accumulates in the second half of every cycle, and the way it collapses again, predictably and brutally, every single time. The way you begin to feel like your body is failing at the one thing it is supposed to do. The way happiness starts to feel conditional - like something you are only allowed when you are pregnant, something that belongs to the version of your life that is always just around the corner.

I know this because I lived it for years. And I know that the mental health toll of infertility is one of the least talked about parts of the whole experience.

For a long time, I did not allow myself to name it as such. I thought of myself as someone who was coping. I was still getting up, still going to work, still smiling through it. I was very good at wiping my eyes, fixing my makeup and walking back in as though nothing had happened. What I did not understand at the time was that the performance of coping is not the same as actually being okay.

The grief that infertility brings is unlike most other kinds of grief. It is a grief without a clear object - you are not mourning someone who was here and is now gone, but someone who was never quite here, someone who existed only in hope and letters and the very specific kind of longing that lodges itself so deeply in your body that you forget there was ever a time when it was not there. It accumulates with every failed cycle, every treatment that does not work, every announcement you have to smile through. And because it is not a grief that the world officially recognises, you often carry it completely alone.

What I wish I had known earlier is that asking for help with your mental health during fertility treatment is not a sign of weakness or giving up. It is, in fact, one of the most important things you can do - for yourself, and, if treatment is ongoing, for the physical process too. The research is clear that prolonged stress affects the body in real and measurable ways. Seeking support is not a luxury or an indulgence. It is part of the treatment.

I eventually found my way to a psychotherapist and a homeopath, both of whom helped me in ways I had not expected. What struck me most was that the most helpful thing either of them did was not focus on getting me pregnant. They focused on helping me feel like a person again. On one of my worst days, all I could say was: please, just switch it off. Whatever this is inside me that needs to have a child. I have had enough. I just want it switched off. That was the moment I knew I had to get help.

There are a few things I would say to anyone who is in the thick of this right now.

The guilt of feeling bad is its own form of suffering, and it is not fair. You may have a wonderful life in many ways - a partner, a home, people who love you - and still be in profound pain about this one thing. Those two things are not in conflict. Your pain is not ingratitude. It is just pain, and it deserves to be acknowledged.

The hope and grief cycle of infertility is genuinely relentless. The high of the two-week wait, the crash of a period arriving or a test that does not go the way you needed - and then, somehow, the renewal of hope, because without it you could not keep going. This cycle is exhausting in a way that is very hard to explain. If you are exhausted, you are not weak. You are carrying something extraordinarily heavy.

And if you find yourself wondering whether what you are feeling is normal - whether the sadness is too much, the anxiety too constant, the despair too deep - please know that it is normal to feel all of that. It does not mean you are broken. It means you are human, and you are in the middle of something very hard.

Getting help was one of the best decisions I ever made. Not because it fixed everything immediately, but because it gave me back some version of myself - the version that could feel grateful, that could be present, that could imagine a future and find something to hold onto in it. You deserve that version of yourself too.

There are moments from writing this book that I return to often. One of them is the first appointment with my homeopath, which lasted over four hours. I had reached what I can only describe as rock bottom - not dramatically, not all at once, but quietly and completely. And on that first day, all I could say to her, over and over, was: "Please switch it off. Whatever this is that makes me want to be a mother. I've had enough. I just want the urge or the need to have a child to be switched off because I can't go on like this."

She did not dwell on that. She asked me about my dreams. She asked about my childhood. And then, towards the end of that session, she asked me to describe my grief - the grief of the failed IVF, of the embryos that had not attached. What came out of me shocked me. I spoke about those two embryos as our much-longed-for babies, about how they had not attached to me, how I had failed them, so they had died. I had not known that was inside me. I had been so resolute after the IVF, so practical about moving forward, that I had not let myself feel any of it. That session was the first time I did.

There is something else I wrote in the book that I want to share here, because I think it is one of the truest things in it: "I think the worst feeling of all is feeling bad for feeling bad." That sentence cost me years. I had a wonderful husband, a supportive family, a beautiful home, friends who loved me. And I was still in agony. The guilt of that - of feeling so low when so much was good - made it almost impossible to ask for help. I knew how it sounded. So I did what I had to do: I wiped my eyes, fixed my makeup, and went into work with a smile.

It was not strength. It was survival. And there is a difference.

If this is where you are right now - running on empty and holding it together on the outside - you are not alone in this. Inconceivable is the full story: the grief, the endurance, and what eventually brought me through. You can also find mental health and infertility support resources for the UK and Ireland in The Library.