On the drive to Saint Augustine, Florida, where my husband and I had planned an anniversary getaway, I realized I was having a miscarriage.

The day before, I’d noticed some unusual spotting and rushed to my ob-gyn’s office. Spotting during pregnancy isn’t uncommon (about 20% of women experience it in the first trimester, according to the American Pregnancy Association) but my doctor also couldn’t detect a heartbeat. She gave me an order for two blood tests to be done exactly 48 hours apart in order to confirm if my HCG—aka the pregnancy hormone—was rising (a sign of a healthy pregnancy) or falling (a sign of a miscarriage), and sent me on my way.

As we drove from our hometown to our destination the next morning, my spotting got heavier and heavier. At that point, just six weeks into my first pregnancy after four months of trying, I didn’t need test results to tell me what was happening.

Miscarriage is heartbreakingly common—about 10-15 percent of women who know they’re pregnant, according to the March of Dimes. (Many more women are thought to miscarry before they even know they’re pregnant.) But knowing that didn’t make me stop wondering: Is there something wrong with me?

It felt—and still feels—surreal to have experienced such joy and such despair so close together. But what feels the most surreal to me still is how complicated healing from a miscarriage can be, even months later—especially when it comes to feeling like a sexual being again. Before my miscarriage, I was sexually on fire. With a surge of pregnancy hormones, I was turned on by the tiniest things and masturbated often if my husband wasn’t available. But in the days leading up to my miscarriage, my sexual frenzy started to calm down—looking back, it may have been a sign of the ebb in hormones that surrounds a miscarriage.

It’s been three months since my miscarriage, and life is mostly back to normal save for the way I feel about my body and my sexuality. I’d like to say that I am a-okay but the truth is I feel out of touch with my body—like my sexuality has disappeared, like my body has failed me. So many of our ideas about womanhood are tied to fertility—our breasts that can feed a baby, our periods that are an indicator of biological maturity, our wombs that can nurture growing life. After a miscarriage, it was hard not to feel like my womanhood had somehow failed me. It was—and still is—hard to feel feminine and sexy and desirable.

I know that motherhood is only one part of what makes me who I am—and as a feminist, I know that for many women motherhood doesn’t factor into their femininity at all. But in the haze of trauma, my femininity and womanhood and sexuality all feel muddled. I have always been a sexual person (I mean, I tried sex meditation and consider masturbation a form of self-care) and as my husband and I continue to talk about kids in our future, embracing my sexuality is even more important to me—even if it’s a little more complicated than it was before my miscarriage.

Feeling sexy again began with Beyoncé. A week into knowing about my pregnancy—a week before the miscarriage—Beyoncé’s Homecoming came out on Netflix. She opened up about her difficult pregnancy with twins Rumi and Sir and I found her admission incredibly inspiring, but what has inspired me every day since has been her previous openness about her miscarriage before Blue Ivy.

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