On a cold table
Aug. 11th, 2021 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jkatkinaA friend of mine had his top surgery a month ago. He's healed enough he can start posting pictures, grinning and topless.
I'm going to have a surgery in the next few months. It's a very boring, fiddly surgery: I'm getting that vascular deformation in my side removed. It's like an a-cup amount of tissue at this point, and annoying. I'm not looking forward to surgery but I am looking forward to being able to lay on that side of my body without discomfort.
I've had to work hard to love my body. The main motivator to learn to do so hasn't been gender, but instead, chronic illness. The love I have for my body isn't the delight of enjoyment, or even the love you have for a beloved friend. It's more like the love you have for a baby: this is my body, and sometimes it causes me pain, and sometimes it ruins my social life, and sometimes I get so, so frustrated with it. But this is my body. It does its best. It does it earnestly. It's my job, and only my job, to take care of it: it needs me, and sometimes it loves me back. I love my body, and that love is hard-won.
When I think about top surgery, I think about being an early teen. Suddenly, I had breasts and hips, it seemed like overnight. And you know what? they're fucking excellent breasts. As a breast appreciator, I have fantastic titties. And they're my friends! They have names. They're great fun.
But when I think about my friend and his newly flat-chested selfies and how big he's smiling, I think about the teenage me and standing in front of the mirror and staring at, suddenly, all of this extra flesh. It was like someone had drawn a line under my head and someone else's body had been swapped in below. And you know what? Master of normalization that I was at that age, I decided this must be the common experience of adulthood. That everyone has to work to become okay with their adult body. That you have to keep staring at yourself in the mirror, reminding yourself that yes, this body is yours, and if it doesn't look like yours, you just aren't used to it yet. So you know what? I got used to it.
I learned to love it. Like you love a baby. Sometimes, like you love a good Halloween costume.
But when I look in the mirror, that invisible line still lives between my head and my body.
When I think about top surgery I think about this vascular surgery I've got coming up. That irritating mass of tissue! Gone! It was never meant to be there, it's perfectly reasonable to want it gone. I'm resolved to go through with it: my life will unequivocally be better without this mess of tissue.
And -- when I think about that mass of my cells and my flesh on a cold metal plate, dying alone, removed from their home in my body, a part of me excised and exiled and killed, I feel intense sorrow.
My friend wrote, in his top surgery post, "I was surprised how relaxed I was going in to surgery. Totally unbothered."
That vascular mass was only doing what it, for some reason, thought it was supposed to be doing. It was trying to be the best mass of undifferentiated vascular tissue that it could be. It never knew it didn't belong there. I have no medical reason to consign my breasts to the void. They are my friends. I have invited them in to this house, even if they aren't who I would have chosen to live with. Maybe someday. Maybe someday I will choose to make my body look like my body, even if it means killing parts of myself. But today, I can't.
Postscript -- this is a very personal little essay and applies to me and only me. I celebrate the choices others have made in their transitions, and envy the clarity to do so, in a way. Shit's complicated, and everyone's on their own paths.
I'm going to have a surgery in the next few months. It's a very boring, fiddly surgery: I'm getting that vascular deformation in my side removed. It's like an a-cup amount of tissue at this point, and annoying. I'm not looking forward to surgery but I am looking forward to being able to lay on that side of my body without discomfort.
I've had to work hard to love my body. The main motivator to learn to do so hasn't been gender, but instead, chronic illness. The love I have for my body isn't the delight of enjoyment, or even the love you have for a beloved friend. It's more like the love you have for a baby: this is my body, and sometimes it causes me pain, and sometimes it ruins my social life, and sometimes I get so, so frustrated with it. But this is my body. It does its best. It does it earnestly. It's my job, and only my job, to take care of it: it needs me, and sometimes it loves me back. I love my body, and that love is hard-won.
When I think about top surgery, I think about being an early teen. Suddenly, I had breasts and hips, it seemed like overnight. And you know what? they're fucking excellent breasts. As a breast appreciator, I have fantastic titties. And they're my friends! They have names. They're great fun.
But when I think about my friend and his newly flat-chested selfies and how big he's smiling, I think about the teenage me and standing in front of the mirror and staring at, suddenly, all of this extra flesh. It was like someone had drawn a line under my head and someone else's body had been swapped in below. And you know what? Master of normalization that I was at that age, I decided this must be the common experience of adulthood. That everyone has to work to become okay with their adult body. That you have to keep staring at yourself in the mirror, reminding yourself that yes, this body is yours, and if it doesn't look like yours, you just aren't used to it yet. So you know what? I got used to it.
I learned to love it. Like you love a baby. Sometimes, like you love a good Halloween costume.
But when I look in the mirror, that invisible line still lives between my head and my body.
When I think about top surgery I think about this vascular surgery I've got coming up. That irritating mass of tissue! Gone! It was never meant to be there, it's perfectly reasonable to want it gone. I'm resolved to go through with it: my life will unequivocally be better without this mess of tissue.
And -- when I think about that mass of my cells and my flesh on a cold metal plate, dying alone, removed from their home in my body, a part of me excised and exiled and killed, I feel intense sorrow.
My friend wrote, in his top surgery post, "I was surprised how relaxed I was going in to surgery. Totally unbothered."
That vascular mass was only doing what it, for some reason, thought it was supposed to be doing. It was trying to be the best mass of undifferentiated vascular tissue that it could be. It never knew it didn't belong there. I have no medical reason to consign my breasts to the void. They are my friends. I have invited them in to this house, even if they aren't who I would have chosen to live with. Maybe someday. Maybe someday I will choose to make my body look like my body, even if it means killing parts of myself. But today, I can't.
Postscript -- this is a very personal little essay and applies to me and only me. I celebrate the choices others have made in their transitions, and envy the clarity to do so, in a way. Shit's complicated, and everyone's on their own paths.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-18 10:04 pm (UTC)I'm glad it resonated. It's such a strange set of feelings. Surgery is wild even before one starts to think existential let about it. You doing okay after yours?