Pleasure is my business, my life, my joy, my purpose.

Tag: all the feels

One Week Top Surgery Post-Op

I’m a week into recovery and all I want is to be able to sleep laying on my stomach. Not for another 3 weeks… (okay, that’s not *all* I want, but it’s a start… also stretching my arms above my head, oh do I miss that, too!)

Most of the days since surgery have been pretty easy, with a couple exceptions for cranky moments and hard things. I’m super grateful to everyone who brought or bought me foods, especially in the first few days. Having food show up without me having to think much about it was so great and really really useful. And the folks who came over to care for me have been absolutely the best. Your company made the days go faster. You have helped me feel loved and cared for and knowing I could ask for something if I needed it has been so helpful. I still have a few more meals and a few more folks signed up, and I’m super grateful to you, too, and everyone who has read my posts in here and commented support. Lots of gratitude.

Wednesday, Stian helped me shower (yay! Finally!) and we removed the pad and bandage around my chest for likely the last time. I was told at the post-op appointment that I could remove the bandage once it stopped draining, and the bandage we removed yesterday was basically clean. I had previously only really had two chances to see my new chest, when changing the bandage. The last day and a half or so has been a strange and new version of surgery recovery, and also the most emotional so far.

With the bandage off, the physical reality of surgery has hit me. I’ve read about post-surgery depression, which happens with all types of surgery not just trans ones, and so I expected some of that given that my brain is used to depressed places. Expecting it and experiencing it, of course, are different. I’ve had all the emotions around surgery and I’m sure I’m not done. All the pre-surgery questions have come back, not surprisingly. I’m trying really hard to keep my ever-critical Virgo-rising eye from now obsessing over how my new chest looks because I know how it is now is not how it will be. I’m barely a week into healing and I haven’t even seen the areola shape yet as I still have the steri strips on the incisions. Still, though, my brain is a fun overly critical anxious and depressed place, so I’ve been going all the worst places.

At the urging of one of my main care team folks, I read a few different narratives of post top surgery depression that I could find yesterday, and my care person today is someone who has had top surgery, so I’m planning on chatting with him about it. It has been useful to remind myself this is normal, that it is okay, that I won’t feel this way forever, but it is still challenging. I hoped that all the doubt and uncertainty would go away with surgery and that I would love looking down at my new chest and feel so satisfied and content with it. Even though I also knew that wasn’t going to happen right away and that there would be a period of adjustment and likely depression, part of me still hoped I could bypass that somehow. I hoped everything would click into place the way I felt after my first shot of T. Though, I must have forgotten my slow process with that, as well, and the months long break I took about six months in and the struggle and uncertainty there because of how right it feels now.

I am not binary, and that also makes all medical transition more complicated (I think… which is also not to say it isn’t complicated for binary trans folks as well). My genderqueerness means there is no ideal chest, exactly, except for the one I choose. It does not need to look like a “man’s chest” (though, also, there are billions of right ways for a chest to be a man’s chest and tons of variation there, so wtf does that mean, anyway? But also, you know what I mean) nor a “woman’s chest,” (see previous parenthetical statement) and indeed it is neither of those things. It’s mine. It is a genderqueer chest by nature of being on the genderqueer body of a genderqueer person.

The physical reality is still hitting me, and it will likely keep coming. I must build a new relationship with my new chest. I can’t assume the old ways we were together still hold. We have to find new ways of being together, as in the aftermath of any traumatic experience (which surgery certainly, literally, is). And some of that process will be grieving. And some of that process will be gender euphoria. And some of that process will be pleasurable. And some of the process will be terrible. All of the process will be slow.

I Can’t Sleep Lately

I can’t sleep lately.

Well, I’m having trouble getting to sleep is more accurate. Once I’m also I can go 7-9 hours in a row without a problem if I have nothing else scheduled for those hours (and usually I don’t).

This has been going on for far too long. Over a year. Longer. I’m not even sure when it started, if I’m being real. I’ve structured a lot of my life around not being able to sleep during the nighttime. Onyx used to work nights as well, preferring to sleep during the day and work at night. Now everything is out of whack, still getting used to the new hours that he keeps. I keep slipping in and out of daylight hours, uncertain when I want to be awake and when I want to be asleep.

This isn’t what I really want to write about right now.

I’m paralyzed. In paralysis. Having a hard time seeing past my own insecurities and trauma. I can tell it’s out of time, but also it’s because of current experiences, so it’s confusing and disorienting. I feel at war between what I want, what I have, and what I can handle. None of these things are at the same place, and I’m confused and overwhelmed. As often. As always.

On the Love of Self and Selfies

August-September 2015.

August-September 2015.

Selfies are the self-portraits of this current technological age. They tell you a lot about how the person sees themselves; how they want to be seen by others. The angle, the tilt of their head, if the smile is candid or staged, forced or relaxed, or even there at all.

In this age of social media we can (to some degree) control our image: how we are seen, what info about us and our lives is shared, and what is not. Sometimes. Sort of. We can try to tailor our image to fit into what we want to look like, who we want to be, or we can bare it all, our prides and our failings, letting the viewer or reader decide what to keep and what not to.

At the same time, we can only control so much. Other people will post about us, post pictures of us. Other people will see what they want to see, what they can see. What people see will always be filtered, not just through their screens, but through their own perceptions and life experiences, their own projections and assumptions. Do they have context for your words, your hair, your clothes, your all of you? Do they have to fight against their own or your own illusions to see you, or are you real and genuine? Are they real and genuine enough to see you?

How much are any of us related to reality?

I love posed professional-looking glamour shots, candid photos when no one knows a photograph is being taken, group action shots capturing an experience, and everything beyond and in between.

Sixteen. December, 2002.

December, 2002.

I used to hate photos of myself or having my picture taken, a reminder of this body I also hated. This Self I kept hidden and locked up from the world, buried beneath flesh and blood and muscle. Buried deep in some hidden corner of my heart. I tried, often desperately, to stay alive in a world that does not want my kind, which in a world that desperately needs us.

I was praised for emulating others and discouraged from expressing what I genuinely thought or wanted or needed. So I locked myself up so tight I often forgot to breathe. I forgot to move. I forgot to dance. I made a small space inside of myself where I could be free, and I called it paradise. It was a cage. Bits of me leaked out, because I could not help it, but inside I was frozen. Lonely.

I learned to adopt others’ ideas, others’ perspectives, others’ personae just to keep me alive. Though there were plenty of times I did not want to be. I thought for many years of the ways I could end what felt like the torture of living. I never really had access to knives sharp enough in the hardest moments, never a hand steady enough to apply the necessary pressure in the right places with knife in hand. Some kind of self-preservation sabotage, or cowardice.

Just one more day, I would tell myself. One more moment. One more breath. One at a time until the numbness takes over again.

Feeling nothing was often preferred to feeling everything.

The suffocating overwhelm of hopelessness was always more than I could handle.

Sixteen. December, 2002.

December, 2002.

Paradoxically, perhaps (in that way that life is), I found my outlet on stage acting larger than life and speaking four hundred year old lines about love, longing, pain, death, betrayal, revenge, cunning, magic.

I identified with longing: longing for love, longing for belonging. I identified with the uncertainty of desire for life, search for a sense of self, and mistrust of others. I identified with fighting to stay alive against seemingly insurmountable turmoil.

I let other stories, other characters, other personae infuse my being. They lead me back to some depth of myself where I had been hiding. Slowly. Only ever slowly. I got little glimpses of life then through these, glimpses of what life could be, though I never felt like I was part of it. Always a little removed, always a little numb, always a little (or a lot) the outsider. Always terrified of ridicule and mostly indifferent to praise, unable to really believe just about anything as real.

Although acting brought me back to myself, it was still more for others than it was for me.

I woke up one day and realized I was terrified of the world, of the other people in it, and, most importantly, of myself. I had designed a life around this fear, attempting to keep myself safe through hiding, locked away from the world in hopes that would mean I would no longer be hurt.

Determined to understand and integrate the fear, I began to investigate it. Where did it come from? What is real and what isn’t? Why do I act the way that I do? I had already been asking myself some of these questions, but did not realize just how numb I was. Just how locked inside. Just how broken.

June 2014

June 2014

I began to crack open the shell I had built up around myself over so many years, letting the outside in and the inside out. I embraced vulnerability, connection, change. I began feeling again. Deeply. Not just when I was having sex, but all the time. Sometimes more than I could bear.

Somewhere along the way I realized I was missing love for myself and trust in the world. The more I love myself the more I am able to take up space in the world, to be comfortable with who I am and what I am doing. It’s cliche, I suppose, but cliches are cliche for a reason. As I began to love myself more, I began to take selfies and revel in them. Or maybe it was the other way around.

A selfie, for me, is not just about finding the right pose, the right angle, though sometimes it is. It’s about sharing a moment in time, even if my smile often looks the same. It’s allowing myself to open up to myself, open up to the camera, open up to the viewer in a way I used to abhor. It’s showing myself off to the world. It’s taking my place in the world through allowing myself to be in it and take up (digital) space.

January 2016

January 2016

Lost

I got lost somewhere along the way. I often think I wasn’t supposed to look like this. I think life wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Somewhere my voice got lost. I forgot to speak up, then I forgot how to. I removed so much of myself that I started only using other people’s words, not my own. Then I forgot what was mine. I was rewarded for it; they like it when you’re obedient.

People used to comment on my appearance like I was either hiding behind it or using it to express myself. Neither assessment ever felt right to me. What I look like was always disliked, so why not wear what I actually enjoy?

I tried so hard for so long to be comfortable with my outsides and my insides. I was not always sure if either of them was me, really.

I spent so much time frozen and alone. I guess that’s what I got for growing up in Alaska (not really that, but it’s a good excuse).

I spent so much time paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. I guess that was what I needed. . . at the time.

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