I’ve been quiet here but this year has been a ride. At the beginning of the year I got referred to the trans clinic at Kaiser and referred for top and bottom surgery (double incision bilateral mastectomy with nipple graph/ metoidioplasty with urethral lengthening and scrotoplasty). Naturally there’s a pretty big backlog because it was all hands on deck last year for the pandemic.
I’m getting top surgery on Nov. 1.
I’ve had a thought stirring in my mind a lot this year, as I prepare for potentially multiple surgeries that will morph my body into a place that feels more like home than it does in this current state. I’ve been thinking about a lot of the scars (visible and invisible) that were given to me by force:
The dots scattered across my legs from a 2 year infection I was forced to endure without pain medication due to medical neglect.
The invisible scars that caused PMDD and Fibromyalgia and IBS and Vaginismus.
The scars in my brain from the reality of having to dissociate to survive childhood. The gaps in my development (specifically spatial reasoning) from educational neglect.
The invisible scars of spiritual, emotional, and financial abuse that have made adulthood in the default world like playing on hard and sometimes nightmare mode.
The neuropathways that I’m trying to heal with medication and therapy. That will take longer to recover from than the amount of time it took the damage to create.
So many scars I didn’t choose I sometimes feel define my life.
So when I started getting tattoos and dying my hair and wanting to make irreversible medical decisions (like yeeting my uterus) and people asked “what if you regret it later?”
My answer has always been, it will at least have been my choice. It will be something I look back on and remember where I was and why I did it and how important it was to set myself free this way. There will be no regret.
Because these are the scars I chose.
These are the scars that set me free.
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