Today I got a phone call from the local hospital I sent the request for the MRI scan to. They wanted to verify a few details before putting the appointment into the system. A confirmation letter will be sent to my current address via snail mail, which I will thus receive tomorrow. I'm hoping that the MRI scan will take place at least this month, so that the last surgery consult and the surgery itself won't spill too far into next month. It really gets pretty tiring to have all of this going on.
I can really say that since Monday I haven't been feeling myself, really. In as far as 'myself' ever was my self, if you catch my drift. As I mentioned in my previous post it's as though only now I get to fully go through puberty. The past few days I'm noticing this even more. For a few years I figured that I had grown up emotionally and would be comparable to a 16-year old on an emotional level. The past days that theory got thrown pretty much out of the window. Now that I am beginning to accept that I'll finally have my body back I am also beginning to realize that I can only now truly go through puberty. Before I was only pretending.
I never before truly noticed the mental blockades preventing me from feeling and experiencing certain things. I knew that getting the medical research and any surgeries performed to get my body into the state I felt was right, but I was never really able to express why this was important. For years I have been fighting in my experience against often well-intended comments that I should learn to accept and be happy with my body the way it is. Looking back now I can see the unimaginable damage those remarks have caused. Each of them tore away a little bit again of my sense of self-worth and determination. I'd never have to go through puberty. I don't need a self-image. I don't need to listen to these feelings about what'd make me happy. Just numb your feelings a little bit more and everything will be fine.
At the same time that I realize all that I also know fully well that it all doesn't really make a lot of sense rationally. I mean this whole sexuality business. Why waste so much time and effort on it, just for something whose use can be described in two words, those being 'pleasurable' and 'procreation'. The latter doesn't apply to me in any fashion since I wasn't born with any functional reproductive organs. The former is in my view very much debatable. Those who have read my previous posts know that I harbour a deeply seated hatred against sex, sexuality and couples. Maybe it's just that the way I was born and being prevented from going through puberty in any normal fashion fostered this hatred. Maybe the way physicians and psychologists further broke down my psyche together with the sexual abuse and rape I suffered over the past eight years prevented me from ever developing anything but sheer hatred and distrust on those topics.
Then why do I still want this surgery? Why do I feel this absolutely overwhelming need, nay, necessity to get a functional vagina? Maybe it's just that when one is born one has this mental template of one's body, of how it's supposed to be, look and function. Outside influences can tweak and distort it, but it'll always be there, driving one. If that's true then my drive for this surgery is simply to complete this template. It's what I'm supposed to be, look and function like. Maybe it's the final piece of the puzzle which will allow me to finally experience the emotional side of puberty, which is to say making lots of stupid mistakes in the areas of sexuality and dating to become emotionally mature enough to not make those mistakes again.
Maybe this is my last shot at the normal life I feel I never had. I was living in the wrong body all these decades, all because it didn't match up with my mental template. I couldn't find the 'me' in amongst all the chaos and confusion. It feels like a certainty now. Something solid. Something about which I can truly feel that it is me. This body. This mind. These thoughts. Nothing as trivial as the wrong gender either. This isn't about gender, but about existence. In previous posts I sometimes alluded to this, of this body I could see in the distance, but which I could never reach, despite knowing that it was my body. I felt that physicians and psychologists kept me from reaching it.
In the end all it took was the recognition of my body's physical state and a relatively minor surgery to create a new vagina entrance and labia. I'm a hermaphrodite. This is me. It's who I'll always be. It's how I was meant to be. This is right. This feels proper.
This whole process is making so much loose inside my psyche, it's astounding, I had never imagined I could feel like this, even though it is logical at some level. It's wearing me out at the same time, though. I'm sleeping more and more, and trudging off to bed before 10 PM feeling completely exhausted, sometimes literally falling over onto the floor, unable to keep my balance and almost too tired to get up again. It's probably a healthy process, but since I'm catching up on nearly three decades worth of emotional and mental luggage it's also murder on my mental and emotional reserves.
Here's to a well-executed surgery next month and the end of a major chapter. Then it's onwards to the first public hearing in the case against the VUmc hospital's gender team, scheduled for September 24th this year, and with it the confrontation with another major part of my traumas. I just hope I won't have to spend another eight years fighting that war. I'd like to actually do something useful with my life before reaching the half-way point of my body's lifespan. Experiences like I have had and still have make one far too bloody aware of one's own mortality and limited years on this world.
Maya
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