Positive Solace with Attika Choudhary
In March 2020, the UK went into lockdown as did most of the world. As people reached out to Attika, about feeling anxious and confused, she wanted to do something helpful and the “Positive Solace” podcasts were born. Mental health has been her concern for some years and this led to the creation of a team which would make it happen.
Hosted by BBC’s Attika Choudhary, Positive Solace is a podcast that will empower your mind, spread positivity and wisdom. The guests are from different backgrounds, cultures, experience and learning. In their own, unique way they are doing what they can to help their community overcome the challenges and lead people to a better place. The conversations are not scripted: they are raw and show vulnerability and create a place where these voices can empower us all. So come join us as we laugh, get emotional and travel the world!
Positive Solace with Attika Choudhary
Motherhood Lost with Jessica Hepburn
In this episode of Positive Solace: Women of Vision, Attika meets Jessica Hepburn, one of the UK's leading voices on fertility and family.
Jessica has one of the most remarkable and inspiring stories to tell - overcoming adversity and going on to swim the channel to climbing Mount Everest more recently.
While trying to become a mother, she went through 11 rounds of IVF treatment, and an ectopic pregnancy that almost proved fatal, she was down and out and staring into the abyss. Her long cherished ambition to have a family was over.
The mental and physical strain had been enormous – often IVF stories have an extremely happy ending, making all the hurt and pain seem
worthwhile. This one doesn't – there was no baby and no new life that had come from the deep love, support and commitment of her partner.
She had a successful career in the arts, as executive director of the Lyric in Hammersmith, London, one of the country’s best known theatres and spearheaded its £20 million capital redevelopment plan – all the while hiding her intense pain and hurt – of not having a family.
Describing this time as the “darkest period” of her life, she tells Attika what helped to drag herself from the depths of despair to find
hope, zest and a new hunger for life. She has found the strength and conviction to put her experiences into writing - with a bestselling novel on fertility.
Slowly, and methodically, she found it in writing and then in founding the Fertility Fest, co-creating the world’s very first arts festival
dedicated to fertility and modern family making, and finally and more recently, in Adventure Activism, combining her love of challenges with
raising money for charity. She is no athlete as she tells Attika but set herself demanding physical goals.
Listen to Jessica and Attika talk about how from the lowest of lows, you can find your way back to the top and they of course discuss fertility,
what it means to be a mother or not in today’s world - and how the future might look like for women who want a family… and a life that is
fulfilling too in other ways...
You can find more about Fertility Fest here: https://www.fertilityfest.com/
Also, here are some links to Jessica’s literary work.
‘21 Miles’ - https://www.amazon.co.uk/21-Miles-Jessica-Hepburn/dp/1783526092
‘The Pursuit of Motherhood’ - https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Pursuit-Motherhood-Jessica-Hepburn/1783061871
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