The month of October is my favorite month of the year, but it’s also one of the hardest. I have multiple emotional connections to this month that make my experience of it every year full of complications and contradictions. I’m learning to embrace contradiction, to accept that I am going to have conflicting emotions about things, and that’s okay.

October is the month I was born. I was two months premature, born weighing only 2 lbs and 14 oz. If I had been born on time, I would have been born very near to my mother’s birthday on December 21. But I was clearly meant to be an October baby, and this isn’t surprising at all because I have always loved the month of October. Even as a kid, before I understood why this month impacts me so heavily, I remember feeling something come alive in my body when October came around.

October is also Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month. I am 1 in 4 women who’ve had a miscarriage. I’ve actually had two, and the grief and loss I carry with me every day isn’t something I can accurately describe. Every day in the month of October, it’s more and more apparent to me that I do not have children. And I can’t imagine my life right now if I did have kids, so I can say that things turned out for the best, but that doesn’t make the pain any easier to deal with. It doesn’t make the weight any less heavy.

I’ve written a lot about miscarriage over the last several years. I’ve written essays and poems about the experiences of losing two pregnancies, how they different from each other, how they both brutalized my body in ways I still haven’t recovered from, how they exacerbated my anxiety and depression, and how my nightmares have become more visceral, more horrifying than they ever were before.

I will probably always write about my miscarriages. I think that’s okay. Some things we will always carry with us. And this loss is one that is often suffered in silence and invisibility. Too many women feel and are made to feel shame when they miscarry, as though the loss was their fault. My ex-husband’s family members asked me, “What have you been doing? Did you heat something up in the microwave?” as though I must have been responsible. Those words don’t go away. You don’t ever unhear them. I already felt responsible, even though I wasn’t. I didn’t anyone else making me feel worse.

And then I’ve watched different states across the U.S. attempt to make miscarriages punishable by law, something that the courts could arrest and charge pregnant people with if they suspect the woman endangered the pregnancy somehow. So that’s, ya know, a thing now. I don’t live in those states, thankfully, but I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of others who do who now have to live not only with the loss of the miscarriage itself, but also with the fear of potentially being arrested and charged with a felony. The level of fucked up there is truly sickening.

Pregnancy loss is hard to talk about, I think, especially for those who haven’t lived that experience. I felt incredibly isolated and alone after my miscarriages, as if people were too uncomfortable around my pain to be around me at all. That hurt a hell of a lot, too. My best friend was across the country and she wrote to me as much as she could, but my local friends, people I thought I could count on, were gone. Hardly spoke to me. Hardly checked in on me. Or worse, sent me Bible verses, as though that would ever be enough. Told me they were praying for me, as though that would ever be enough. I was already praying. I didn’t need other people to pray for me, I needed people to sit and let me talk. Let me cry. Ask me what I needed.

I don’t know why people act like this when others are grieving. But it was detrimental to me. So now I write about my miscarriages and I don’t give a damn how uncomfortable it makes people. This is something that isn’t written about enough or talked about openly enough, and it that needs to change. I didn’t even know October was Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month until three years after my second miscarriage. It’s not enough for people who have suffered miscarriages to be left alone to suffer and survive. Because for many of us, it is suffering to survive. I was suicidal. I was disassociating. I was losing my sanity, and that’s not an exaggeration.

I’m better now, much better, but that’s only because I had such a strong will to live and I relied on writing to get me through. But I wouldn’t have had to be so resilient if I’d been given the support I needed. And don’t talk about, “Well why didn’t you ask for help?” I was in the middle of a complete breakdown. I already felt like a massive burden on everyone, including my husband. I didn’t know how to ask for help without being more of a burden. I honestly don’t think I could even have admitted how bad things were, I was so out of my own mind. And no one ever saw me in person because they avoided me.

Reach out to the people you know who have lost a pregnancy. They might really need support. You don’t have to know what to say. Just ask what you can do, ask them what they need most, and then do your best to give that to them. They might need distraction. They might need to vent. They might need to get out into nature. They might not even know what they need. Whatever you do, don’t just disappear and ignore them. Even the little you can do will make all the difference.

So this October, I ask you to keep these things in mind. Send someone you know who’s lost a pregnancy some love.