Small Truths From the First Year

Not every post in the first year of 5=3 was about a plaque, a city, or a wall. Some of them were just a sentence or two, written in a quiet moment, because I needed to say something and Instagram was where I was already saying things. Looking back at them now, a few of those short, plain posts say as much about the project's first year as any of the plaques did.

In late November 2024, a few months after the first plaques went up, I wrote: “Let's create more space for conversations about the loss of a child during pregnancy. Let's stop ignoring this topic or pretending it didn't happen.” I didn't have a plan for how to do that beyond the plaques themselves — I just wanted to say it plainly, in public, without softening it.

A few weeks later, in December, I wrote something I still think about: “I think when it's hard to talk about what really matters, it only makes us feel worse. But sometimes, having someone else speak for us is enough.” That's close to the whole idea behind 5=3 — not that I have the right words for anyone else's loss, but that a formula on a wall can sometimes say the thing a person hasn't found words for yet.

I only found out that many women I know had experienced pregnancy loss when I went through it myself. No one had ever talked about it. I had no idea how common it was.

I wrote that sentence in March 2025, almost a year in, and I now hear some version of it back from other women more than any other. Every time someone tells me they were surprised by how many people around them had quietly gone through this too, I think back to that post.

None of these were plaque stories. There's no city, no wall, no glue. Just three short truths from the first year, written in the middle of ordinary days, that turned out to matter more than I expected when I wrote them.

Looking back, the plaques and these small posts were doing the same job in different materials — one asks a stranger to notice something in public, the other asks a follower to sit with it before scrolling on. Neither fixes anything, and neither was meant to. Both just take a private number and let someone else see it, which is most of what this project has ever tried to do. A year on, what stays with me is less the wording of any post and more what's left after a loss once the shock passes, and how much lighter that gets when someone else already knows the number.