my scars are turning one!

[radfrac_archive_full]

In fifteen days it will be the first anniversary of my top surgery.


What I like most was that I wasn't afraid.

For the month leading up to surgery, I was convinced that I was going to die under the anaesthetic. I knew it was improbable. I didn't believe in my fate every waking minute. I just got to know it as a possibility in a different way from my everyday vague dread. I was deliberately putting myself in the way of death. I was saying, "Hey! Death. It's me. Frac. You remember--almost choked that time in the lunchroom? I'll be unconscious and helpless and bleeding for several hours on June Third. Just saying."

I'm glad for that time. I got to make a different kind of truce with mortality. It really did make me have to fall back into the moment. To love it because there was no counting on a better one coming. Fortunately it was June, when it is easy to love the moments around here.

I finished a short story that I'd been meaning to get done. I wrote out an elaborate and unlikely set of last requests, mostly involving publication of my Works. I cleaned my apartment. I got my affairs as much in order as they were likely to get.

Still, the night before surgery, and I'll tell this story again, I couldn't sleep. The owner of the apartment we were borrowing had kindly left a full-length sheet of mirror propped up against the bedroom wall.

I got down on the floor. I looked into the mirror. I said, "Are you okay with this?"

"Because you can stop. You can go home right now. Well, there's no ferry now. But first thing tomorrow. You don't have to live up to anything. You don't have to worry about letting anyone down. Hell, they got to go to MEC, didn't they?"

"For all your whining, you quite like being alive. What if you do die on the table? Are you okay with that?"

All at once, it got simple. "Yes." I said. "I'm okay with that. Because I will have died doing something I chose for myself."

It's a long day waiting for surgery. They move you around. They ask you lots of questions. They leave you unattended for long periods of time. Sometimes they let people wait with you, and then sometimes, for no very clear reason, they have to go away. At one point I had a ventilin mask strapped over my face, with clouds of medicine frothing out like a dragon's smoke. Apprehension, anxiety, boredom, excitement, fear--they wash up and wash away, and come back again.

When they took me on the gurney to the room-before-the-operating-room, and I was waiting, flat on my back with pen marks drawn all over my chest to show how to put me back together again, it came to me that I wasn't afraid. Not even a little bit. I just felt good. I felt happy at the thought of having surgery. I felt a little sad at the thought of dying. I felt no fear at all. Not even nerves.

I told Leirdal about this, afterwards, when I could speak again. We agreed that they must have put something in my saline drip to calm me down before the surgery.

So when the nurse came in, I asked her, "Did you give me a sedative while we were waiting? In the drip? To keep me calm?"
"Nope." She said. "Just saline."
I looked at Leirdal. "But I wasn't scared." I said.
"Well." she said. "Then I guess you weren't scared."

Whenever you make a drastic change in your life of whatever kind, when you choose to let go of something big (well, C-size, anyway, at the time), you ask yourself if you really need to do it. Well, I do. Maybe you're one of those spontaneous people I've always envied. Me, I brood.

If it's elective surgery, you'd better know that you're not just trying to prove a point. It better be something more than that, something from the deep part of yourself. There's not just death. There's infection, there's human error, there's quack doctors and poor results and regret, and it's my opinion that you should not just be surfing the possibilities, hoping those things don't happen; you should be ready to believe that they might, and you should want to do it anyway.

Beyond the immediate physical risks, there are other questions that are too obvious not to ask. Does it have to be this? Can I make some other compromise with the world? Can I live without doing this?

Let me tell you about my answer to that. It's not a simple one.

I went running today. It was a great run. I started off with sore shins and some mild asthma. I figured I wasn't going to make it very far, but instead of being bummed about it, I told myself that it was all right because at least I was prepping for the run with stitchinmyside on Sunday. That's the thing about even a crappy run. It might suck, but you're making yourself a better runner every time you go out there. You can't help but improve just by doing it.

It turned out to be my best solo run to date. I ran faster and longer than I ever have. When I saw the last half-block of hill coming up, I put my head down and sprinted. (For, you know, about twenty metres, but still.) Then I walked it out to the freakishly beautiful sounds of Arcade Fire. (stitchinmyside--the one that goes something like "come on hide your lovers / underneath the covers"--I love it.)

I could have lived without having surgery. I could have made some other compromise with the world. I did that for five years, and I was even happy. I had lovers and friends and jobs and a whole life.

There are lots of ways to make peace with different levels of gender dysphoria, and every person has to make their own deal with themselves and the world. There's no wrong choice. There's just big life and small life.

The ex-co-con and I used to run along the breakwater together. I was embarrassed by my body and the way I felt like people looked at me. But I went, because it felt better to run than not to run. If I hadn't had surgery, I might still choose to run.

I even found a way to swim. I did it in a binder, and it used to ride up or float down, and my Dog it was uncomfortable, but I hated being kept out of the water so much that I did it anyway, and it was a lot better than not swimming at all.

I won't tell you that wanting surgery was life or death. It wasn't. It was small life or big life, small-m me or ME big enough for all the kinds of yes.* That's good enough. It's all right to choose a bigger life, when you have the choice. There are so many times we don't.

My whole life is bigger and freer because I had surgery. Not in its outward details, but inside of me. I belong to myself now, and not to someone's idea of what I should have been or done.

There's this huge field inside me where there used to be a narrow path. It goes on out to the horizon in every direction, and it's all space to be what I am. I can run as free and as far as I like, and no one can stop me, and no one can take it away from me. I claimed it. I made it happen.

And in the end, I wasn't afraid.

It's one of those small things that you hold, because you were proud of yourself when you weren't expecting to be.


*Thanks, Leirdal, for posting the ee cummings poem in the notes to a previous post... and for uncountable other things beyond measure. Including innumerable pieces of peanut butter toast.

That line is also, of course, the title of a story by James Tiptree, Jr., who had many interesting things to say and live about gender.

Obviously, I didn't die. Everything went flawlessly. I'd say textbook, except there are some really gross things in textbooks.


Anyway. Party at the Station. June Third. It's a Saturday. But what shall it be? Suggestions! Not mock posh, though. It's not that kind of gig.

I half want to arrange a trip to Vancouver to re-enact our journey. Sans surgery and raccoon, obviously.

Oh. Yes. The raccoon. Would everyone who was present for the raccoon story please email me their versions of it, and I'll post an amalgamation? I'll ladder excerpts next to each other so they set each other off. Come! Collaborate with me! Let me suture your words together with love and narrative drive.

Now I want some peanut butter toast.

{rf}

I was going to post some of my research on LJ-as-a-genre, but Explorer felt I had too many windows open and crashed. So instead you get the personal essay. La la la lucky us.