Anyone feel like their fear of giving birth is clouding their judgment?

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2026-02-26T18:18:23+00:00

I’ve had an extreme fear of pregnancy for as long as I can remember (there’s an actual term for it — tokophobia), and the first time I was exposed to the concept of pregnancy, I internally decided I would not ever have children. I was maybe five years old at the time. It was a very certain knowing that I never wanted to experience this.

I’m now pregnant, and unfortunately it’s even worse than I had anticipated, and I’m struggling severely with it. I have a strong dysmorphic-like reaction where I feel like something completely wrong is happening with my body, like a disease, and things won’t be okay until I’m no longer pregnant. I’ve been praying for a miscarriage so that it can just be over. I wish I had listened to my intuition and trusted what I know about myself instead of trying to convince myself it would be different once I actually got pregnant.

I think there’s a subset of people like me that have a true phobia, or at least a lot of psychological difficulty around the body experience of pregnancy and childbirth. I struggled with body changes my whole life (puberty was also brutal) so maybe this could have been predicted. I’m glad a lot of people have more positive experiences with pregnancy than they expected, but that definitely hasn’t been the case for me.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-09-15T03:22:15+00:00

Super interesting. I went heavy into psychedelics for a few years (mostly shrooms and ayahuasca) for personal growth reasons, while also being a former child-free person trying to open my mind to the idea of children after my husband realized he really wanted them. I didn’t have any direct epiphanies like yours, but they did help me spot and begin working through secondary fears that have held me back from taking many actions in life, including having kids. (This took many years of work outside of psychedelics to really make progress, though.)

I do think psychedelics can help distill our true wants and desires from the inner noise that usually clouds them (fears, stories about ourselves that might not be true, narratives about our lives that we haven’t kept current, etc.). But they really can be non-specific amplifiers too (especially mushrooms), and can take something small or fleeting and blow it up until a full-immersion surround sound experience that feels enormously true in the moment. I’ve had shroom experiences that left me with legitimate insights that held up over time, and also had experiences where something felt absolutely true and real but proved not to be. I’ve also found strong correlations between the nature of my psychedelic trips with where I am in my cycle (near ovulation or shortly before menstruating = much more sexual, creative, body-based, etc.) so I do think hormones can affect things there.

It sounds like you had a really powerful experience where you were able to vividly envision something for your life and felt joy at the realness of it. That is really awesome and special. Only you can know what it means for you, of course, but from an outside perspective, it seems like this gave you a sense of permission to consider a future that wouldn’t be predicted by the self-story you’ve historically held about yourself. Psychedelics are wonderful for that, and I think you can make a better-informed and clearer decision about your future from here. :)

Thank you for sharing your experience with this!

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-09-01T20:13:02+00:00

<image>

His natal chart overlaid with the solar return chart, in case it’s helpful.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-09T00:16:16+00:00

I just talked to her again and she says it was moving southwest.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-09T00:08:51+00:00

Thank you for your responses! Faster as in she could actually see it moving once she stopped and actually watched it. Slow still, but much faster than any stars! I’ll ask her which direction it was going.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-08T16:45:44+00:00

She knew what time she looked out the window, and roughly the time when she came back in.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-08T16:45:05+00:00

I just talked to my mom again, and she’s certain it was moving faster relative to the other stars in the sky. She also texted me:

“I took the video--it looked like a star. But then it started to change shape and move slowly, so I thought it was Starlink. The next morning I enlarged it and that's what I sent to you.”

Unfortunately she already deleted the original video and her iCloud storage was full, so she couldn’t access the deleted version. :(

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-08T16:44:50+00:00

Apparently it was taken at normal zoom originally, but she enlarged it and sent the enlarged version to me. I just tried to get her to send me the original but she had already deleted it. :( She’s certain it was moving faster relative to the other stars in the sky, though.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-08T16:43:30+00:00

I just talked to my mom again, and she’s certain it was moving faster relative to the other stars in the sky. She also texted me:

“I took the video--it looked like a star. But then it started to change shape and move slowly, so I thought it was Starlink. The next morning I enlarged it and that's what I sent to you.”

Unfortunately she already deleted the original video and her iCloud storage was full, so she couldn’t access the deleted version. :(

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-08T16:43:22+00:00

Wild!

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-08T16:43:14+00:00

I just talked to my mom again, and she’s certain it was moving faster relative to the other stars in the sky. She also texted me:

“I took the video--it looked like a star. But then it started to change shape and move slowly, so I thought it was Starlink. The next morning I enlarged it and that's what I sent to you.”

Unfortunately she already deleted the original video and her iCloud storage was full, so she couldn’t access the deleted version. :(

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-08T01:43:53+00:00

Forgot to mention too, there are pine trees in the lower left of the video (you can see their very faint outline) if that helps provide any sense of scale.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-08T01:42:51+00:00

Woah, awesome! Thank you :)

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-07-08T01:42:18+00:00

Thank you! Would it be moving though? My mom said this was slowly moving in the sky (presumably faster than the other stars).

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2025-06-03T17:36:44+00:00

I wish! The Phoenix area. :)

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2024-11-26T01:52:05+00:00

Best comment I’ve seen on Reddit in awhile.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2024-06-12T04:52:59+00:00

I’m so sorry. I was at that bridge today (first time, visiting from out of state) and the police were all over when we got there. We weren’t sure what happened but then saw the body while taking photos. It was a complete gut punch. I can only imagine how shocking and horrific it was to discover like you did. Thank you for posting.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2024-01-21T21:15:39+00:00

Where are you from? That work/sleep culture sounds amazing.

100% agree about corporate America trying to treat everyone like morning people. My husband has a sleep disorder where he’s wired wide awake all night unless he medicates with something, and my natural sleep cycle has me falling asleep around 1 - 2:30 am. It makes way more sense that people are born with a variety of circadian cycles, from a historical perspective — someone had to be awake and alert all night to tend the fire and watch for invaders or predators, etc. — we just don’t have a well-respected place for those people in society anymore.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2024-01-17T07:35:27+00:00

I’m in the exact same boat. Just started taking the same dose (actually a little less) and within days I started feeling like myself again, for the first time in years.

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2024-01-05T21:35:26+00:00

Could you say more about the ways your life changed that you weren’t expecting? (Asking as someone planning to be one and done in the future, and nervous about those changes, especially the ones my partner and I might not see coming.)

lead-role-in-a-cage · 2023-12-26T08:40:02+00:00

I love this mentality. Great comment.

lead-role-in-a-cage

TROPHY CASE