My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Healing After Miscarriage: Running Became My Therapy
By Celeste, 33 — Denver, CO
Healing after miscarriage is not the straight line that people imagine when they tell you it gets better. It is not a line at all. It is more like weather — calm for a while, then a front moves in and you are standing in the dairy aisle crying because there is a baby on a yogurt lid. I lost my pregnancy at eleven weeks in October, and by November I was lacing up shoes in the dark and running before the sun came up, running before any person could see me, running before anyone could ask how I was doing.
I did not plan to become a runner. I had never been one. In college I was the girl who walked the mile in P.E. and felt zero shame about it. But grief does strange things to your body. Mine felt wrong — like a house that had been emptied of furniture but still had all the lights on. I needed to do something physical, something exhausting, something that did not involve sitting still with the thoughts that came when I was still.
When Grief Lives in Your Body, Not Your Mind
The first morning I ran was November fourth. I remember the date because it was the day after I returned to work and sat through a meeting about packaging colors while my insides felt like wet cement. I smiled at the right times. I nodded. I took notes. And when I got home I sat on the bathroom floor for forty-five minutes because I could not figure out what to do next.
That night I set my alarm for four fifty. I did not set it for five because I wanted the extra ten minutes to talk myself out of going back to sleep. I put on leggings, a hoodie that used to be my husband Marc’s, and a pair of sneakers I had bought for a gym membership I never used. I stepped outside into cold air that stung my throat and I started walking, then jogging, then something that loosely qualified as running.
The streets in our neighborhood were empty. Porch lights were on but every window was dark. I could hear my own breathing, loud and ragged, and my shoes on the pavement, and nothing else. No one asking if I wanted tea. No one suggesting I try journaling. No one telling me about their cousin who had a miscarriage and then got pregnant the very next month, as if that story was supposed to help.
I ran six blocks and had to stop. My lungs burned. My calves ached. And for the first time in weeks, the ache was mine — it was something I had chosen, something I understood the source of. That distinction mattered more than I can explain.
Miscarriage Grief and the Silence Nobody Prepares You For
The silence was the hardest part, but not the kind people think. There was plenty of noise after the miscarriage — phone calls, text messages, flowers on the doorstep. People were kind. That was not the problem. The problem was the silence inside me, the numbness that settled in like fog. I felt numb everywhere. In my chest, in my hands, in the way food tasted and music sounded. Marc would hold me at night and I could feel the weight of his arms but not the warmth. I knew it was there. I just could not reach it.
My therapist used the word dissociation. I used the word broken. We agreed to disagree on terminology and focus on what might help. She suggested starting with my body — not jumping back into intimacy with Marc, not trying to feel everything at once, but finding small ways to remind my nervous system that sensation was still available. That I was still alive inside this body that had, in my darkest moments, started to feel like a place I no longer trusted.
So I ran. Every morning. In the dark. Six blocks became ten, then a mile, then two. I did not track my pace. I did not care about distance. I cared about the feeling of cold air in my lungs and concrete under my feet and sweat running down my back. These were sensations I could verify. These were proofs of presence.
Marc watched me from the bed those mornings, half awake, not sure what to say. He had lost something too. I knew that. But my grief and his grief were in different rooms of the same house, and neither of us had found the hallway between them yet.
How Running Helped Me Feel Again After Loss
By December I was running three miles every morning. My body was changing — not in the way it had been changing before, not in the way I had wanted it to change. But my legs were stronger. My breathing was steadier. I noticed things on those runs that I missed during the day. A particular house on Vine Street that always had a lamp on in the upstairs window at five fifteen. A cat that sat on the same porch every morning and watched me pass without blinking. The way the sky looked in the fifteen minutes before sunrise — not dark and not light, but something in between that felt honest.
One morning in mid-December, I was running past a park where Marc and I had once sat on a bench and talked about baby names. I had been avoiding that park. But my legs carried me past it before my brain could reroute, and instead of the collapse I expected, I felt something open. Not happiness. Not peace. Just a small, warm recognition that I had been here before and I was still here now. That I had survived the bench. That I could survive the bench.
I stopped running and stood there, breathing hard, hands on my knees, and I cried. Not the bathroom-floor crying. A different kind. The kind that moves through you and leaves you lighter. A woman walking her dog crossed the street to avoid me, which in retrospect was probably fair.
That night I told Marc what had happened. He listened without trying to fix it. He put his hand on my knee and I could feel the warmth. Really feel it. Not just know it was there, but feel it travel through my skin and into whatever was underneath. It was the first time in weeks that touch did not feel like something happening to someone else’s body.
We did not fix everything that night. We did not have some cinematic breakthrough. But we sat on the couch after dinner, closer than we had been sitting, and he asked me what the mornings felt like and I told him the truth — that they felt like the only time I was fully inside myself. He said he understood that, and I believed him.
Rebuilding My Relationship with My Own Body
January was when things started to shift in the way my therapist had been gently steering me toward. Not all at once. In pieces. I started paying attention to what felt good again — a hot shower after a cold run, the pressure of my own hands on sore muscles, the specific comfort of climbing into a bed I had made that morning.
I bought myself a small wellness device from HiMoment after reading something about somatic reconnection. It felt awkward at first, like learning a language I used to speak. But there was something about choosing to feel something — deliberately, on my own terms — that mattered. It was not about pleasure the way I had understood pleasure before. It was about agency. About telling my body that it was still mine, that what had happened inside it did not define what could happen inside it.
Marc did not know about it at first. Not because I was hiding it, but because it was mine — the same way the running was mine. My therapist called these self-regulation practices. I called them my morning and my night. One to wake up inside my body. One to settle back into it.
By February, Marc and I had started talking more honestly than we had in years. Not about the miscarriage specifically, but about us — about the ways we had each quietly retreated into separate versions of the same sadness. He told me he had been afraid to touch me because he did not want to remind me of what my body had been through. I told him that his not touching me had made me feel like my body was something to be afraid of. We both cried. It was not pretty. It was necessary.
We started slow. Not slow in the way that romance novels mean. Slow in the way that two people who have been numb together learn to feel together again. A hand on a shoulder that stays. A kiss that is not a greeting but an intention. The willingness to be awkward, to laugh at the awkwardness, to let the awkwardness be part of the tenderness.
What Healing After Miscarriage Actually Looks Like
I still run. It is June now and the sun is up before I am, which means I have lost my cloak of darkness and have to nod at other joggers like a normal person. I do not love this. But I do it.
I still have hard days. Two weeks ago I saw a pregnant woman at the grocery store and had to sit in my car for ten minutes before I could drive home. But the hard days have space between them now. They are not the whole calendar anymore. They are single squares that I move through and then put behind me.
Marc and I are not trying again yet. We might. We might not. For now we are trying to be two people who are fully present in the same room, and most days we manage it. Some nights we are closer than we have ever been. Some nights we are just tired. Both of those feel honest, and honest is what I need right now.
The other morning I was running past the park — my park, the bench park — and I noticed the bench had been repainted. Bright green, almost absurd against the brown grass. Someone had chosen that color on purpose. Someone had decided that bench deserved to be seen.
I did not stop. I kept running. But I smiled, and the smile was real, and the air was cold, and I was alive, and that was enough.
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