It Isn't Everything - ThreadHunters

It might not be clear what it is, but what is clear is that it isn’t everything.

whether it's infertility, your career, your romantic relationship, or anything else, it isn't everything. — Whatever it is, it isn’t everything. There is so much to be thankful for in the other parts of our lives

In my mind, the “it” is infertility and it is represented by the flower pot with nothing growing inside. And the life around the empty pot represents all the other forms of fulfillment in an infertile’s life.

I shared this drawing with my cousin when I was part way through the process of creating it and talked about my intentions with it and she commented that really, the empty pot could be any part of a person’s life that hasn’t lived up to the expectation, be it their romantic relationships, career, family, home life, physical health, mental health, or any number of other things. And I have to say I agree with her.

We all have things in our lives that we’re not happy with, areas where we planted seeds and provided water and sunlight and care and yet nothing took root. If we focus on the empty pot, we could start to feel like failures, like nothing ever goes right, like there’s no good here.

But if we look outside the pot we see the life and the wildflowers that have grown around us, the vibrant colours and the joy exist in the other aspects of our lives. Because whatever was supposed to be in the pot… Well, it isn’t everything. There is fulfillment and purpose for us elsewhere.

It Isn’t Everything Design Process:

This design and the concept changed a lot since my first ideas of it. Around the time I started drawing this design, there was some talk on Instagram in the infertility community about whether or not a person is still infertile if they have gotten pregnant or have managed to grow their family through whatever means. In their Fab Fertilty podcast from July 9th, Alex @rockabyemaybe and Blaire @fabfertility talked about the #stillinfertile movement to bring awareness to the reality that whether or not you have kids doesn’t change the fact that you are infertile.

The main idea was that wherever you are in your infertility journey you should be allowed to be part of the infertility community.

So my idea was to create a design that would promote the conversation around the permanence of infertility. I drew an empty flower pot and above it I wrote “infertile.” It was going to be a series, the next one being “still infertile.” In my mind someone could sport these designs even after they have grown their family, because raising kids doesn’t erase what you went through in the process to have them. I showed this design to my sisters, one of whom has also experienced infertility and she said “wow, that’s harsh”.

And when I thought about it, yeah it was.

But infertility is harsh too… I took some time to think about what message I really wanted to send into the world and I realized that while infertility is a big part of what I am, it isn’t everything. So I set about creating a much more colourful and vibrant image and decided the message should be “infertile isn’t all I am”.

I started sketching out some flowers and decided to frame the flower pot with life and colour and growth to represent all the good that exists around and maybe in spite of infertility.

The supports, the understanding, the family and friends the hopefulness, the good outcomes… There is a lot outside of infertility that makes us who we are and maybe that’s what we should celebrate!

Of course, as I mentioned before, when I showed the idea to my cousin I realized that this applies to more than just infertility.

And they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I got rid of the words and let the image speak for itself. That’s how we got to the finished design you see on many items on this site!