T-Minus one week and counting....

I'm thirty-one years old, and for nearly two-thirds of that time, I've felt like something is wrong with me on a fundamental level.  For the last five years, I've been trying to find out who I really am in a way that most people get to do during their teenage years, and I still haven't been able to figure it out.  You don't know how hard that really is until you're trying to make up for lost time, and you've spent twenty-five years suppressing that very thing.  My transition has been one of the easiest I've ever heard of -- my family and friends, even my employer, they've all been terrifically supportive in a way I could never have imagined.  Even with all that, I still feel like I'm flailing around in the darkness, trying to grab the rung of a ladder while I plunge downward.

I know that I want what surgery will give me -- I think my big worry is that I won't be able to handle the actual adjustment period to get there.  The surgery in itself is bad enough -- intellectually, I know that it's almost routine, that I'm in fairly good health, that I'm seeing one of the most respected surgeons of this type in the country for it, that I'll have my mom with me -- but it's still only the second time I've really gone under the knife.  Seeing something like that on television or reading about it in a book is completely different.  Even though I will probably not remember anything but falling unconscious and waking back up in the recovery room, when you think about it, what is happening is inherently traumatic.  Someone is cutting you up and putting you back together again (and in this case, in a totally different way), causing the kind of damage to your integral sense of self that if it happened in any other context would be horrific.  It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder about the true nature of the self (or, if you prefer, the soul).  Who are we?  Are were entirely separate from our bodies, or how does change to one change the other?

I've always wondered about people like Stephen Hawking -- a man with one of the most brilliant minds the world has ever seen, trapped in a body that is rebelling against itself, slowly destroying him.  What does that feel like?  How do you deal with the fact that you are entombed within your own body without going completely mad?  I don't know that I could deal with that kind of a situation; and yet, in some small way, I have been dealing with a similar problem.  How does the brain cope with that?  How does it accept and adapt to that kind of situation?  What will I feel after I have surgery?  Will I suffer from "phantom limb"?  It's very frightening in a sort of Lovecraftian "sudden moment of comprehension" horror kind of way, at least to me.  Maybe I'm being a little overdramatic; I just can't help but feel apprehensive about my prospects.

When we get to my specific issue, and the question is, is this really all going to be worth it in the end?  I do want the surgery -- I do want to have the body to match my gender -- but I have also gotten used to the body I have now.  Change is scary, especially change that is pretty much irreversible and requires total commitment.  Maybe I don't like living in Champaign, but if I move somewhere else, there's no guarantee I'll like it any better, and it could cost me a bunch of money, time, and stress to move.  You can test out a change of venue, at least in some small way, but SRS does not really come in a trial size, unless you count the last 5 years since I transitioned -- and that's not quite the same thing.

It's like going skydiving -- once you're out of the plane, you can't really decide to go back in if you don't like it, and if your parachute fails, that is probably going to be all she wrote.  On the other hand, it could end up being the most exhilarating, liberating experience of your life -- unfortunately, you can't really just "test it out" first.  You either jump out of the plane, or you don't.  I don't plan to take up skydiving anytime soon (sorry GP), but I'm about to take a plunge about as precipitous in about 7 days.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling on, but I've been rather introspective lately, and the reality of the situation is just starting to actually take hold of me; I know it's a bit late in the game, but something like this, you don't really absorb exactly what you've committed to when it seems far off....now, with a week to go, it's more "real" than ever.