A celebrity story broke last week that gave me, as my fellow young people would say, all the feels. But they were not good feels. In fact, they were pretty much every feel except the good kind: sad for the celebrity, bad about myself, uncertain about the world today.
This story was about Chrissy Teigen, a model and the wife of the singer John Legend, although neither of those descriptors really explains her popularity. Rather, that is down to what is frequently described as her “relatability”, or her willingness to share her personal life with the world. This, according to current thinking, makes this extremely beautiful and wealthy woman more real to the public. Over several days, she posted videos of herself on Twitter and Instagram, talking about how she’d been having heavy bleeding while pregnant. “Chrissy Teigen shares updates from hospital bed as she prepares for second blood transfusion” and “Pregnant Chrissy Teigen’s horror scare as she scrambled to hear baby’s heartbeat” were just two of the newspaper headlines, as if it were totally normal that a woman’s intimate pregnancy issues should be international news.
Normally, I ignore news stories ripped from a celebrity’s social media feed, as they are little more than press releases, given that they were written by the celebrity. But it turns out Teigen is more relatable than I thought. Last year, I also had some bleeding while pregnant, and went to the same hospital as Teigen. As I waited for the scan, I cried and blamed myself: for travelling to Los Angeles while pregnant, for being 41, for maybe losing yet another baby. I also thought of Ariel Levy’s 2013 article about her stillbirth: “I knew that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me.”
In the end my baby was fine, but seeing Teigen’s daily posts was like watching the past unspool and knowing that the future is not as guaranteed as Teigen’s followers seemed to think (“You got this, girl!” “Stay strong! You’re amazing!”). Then, last Thursday morning, Teigen posted more photos from hospital: she had lost her baby.
How should we talk about this kind of loss? I admit, my first thought on seeing the photos on every news website of Teigen bent forward and weeping – photos taken from her social media – was “Maybe not like this?” It reminded me of a time last year when Alec Baldwin’s wife, Hilaria, posted a video of herself telling their young daughter that she’d just had a miscarriage. So-called mumfluencers are praised for taking whatever stigma there still is out of breast-feeding, fertility trouble and more. But when I saw a photo of one – taken by who, her husband? – sitting on a toilet and crying, with a long caption about her miscarriage, I wondered if the cost of stigma removal was self-exploitation. It felt not intimate but voyeuristic, and I know too well how long it takes to recover from these things.
Is it helpful to these women to have these images, taken in the heat of shock and grief, follow them around for ever? Or is even asking this question “concern trolling”, expressing faux concern as a cover for snark? And who am I to judge anyway? I have written here about my own miscarriage, and I just told all of you about the bleeding. Is writing about something months after the event that different from posting it live? It felt different to me, but maybe it isn’t.
We live in a performative age. We’re rewarded for revealing our private lives to strangers, for exaggerating our emotions online, for sharing every crisis that happens in our bodies, every thought that passes through our heads. So many of us now depend on the reactions of strangers for our own identity. Why, four months later, did I need to post a photo on Instagram of my baby the day after she was born? I tell myself that it’s so family and friends can know all is well, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a kick of validation from seeing the likes rack up. When you can’t even go through one of the most intimate experiences of your life without seeing how others react, how do you know what you feel about anything any more?
It is the height of narcissism (more so than taking a selfie) to assume that my feelings are applicable to all women. I can see online that many women find Teigen’s openness helpful, with some realising, at last, that it wasn’t their fault after all. And while I would have killed anyone who responded to my own miscarriage with an emoji (“So sad! Sadface!”), I can also imagine how, for some, to have millions commenting on a personal loss might be helpful – liberating, even. Once the wall between your private and public lives has dissolved, as it now has for so many, then what’s the difference?
Honestly, I’m still uncertain how healthy that dissolve really is. But whether you send a quiet text to a friend about your miscarriage, or announce it to the world on social media, or in an article, the mediums differ but the message is always the same: you loved, you lost.
