The experience I have been contending with since my facial surgery in November has been quite different. I saw this surgery as crossing a finish line of sorts. I saw it as the second of two surgeries I wanted for decades, and that I needed to have so I could be the truest version of myself, fit this truest version of myself into the world, and grant me some semblance of internal peace.
Wow, has it not been that at all.
First off, I need to say that, even though it’s been three months since my surgery, I still feel pretty beat up. My chin is almost completely numb, as is my upper forehead and the crown of my head. I also now have an incision that crescents across the top of my head from ear to ear, and the scar is very visible because they had to shave that area to make the incision AND because the scar there is going to prevent a swath of hair from growing back. Couple that with scalp trauma from the surgery itself and the hair loss that seems to come from going under general anesthesia, and my hair has never looked worse and never looked thinner.
Add in to all of this, that while the surgery has helped soften me a bit, it’s still nowhere NEAR enough. While the frequency may be a little less than it was before, people who see me on the street still pretty much instantly “sir” me. In short, to the world… and to me… my face ultimately still looks male, and my staunchest hope in going through this ordeal is that this would NOT be the case.
On top of that, my neck and jaw still look SO wrecked that they may have looked better before surgery, and I don’t know how much, if any more, I'm going to heal.
All of this is CRUSHING to me.
People have told me, “Well, if you’re not happy, you need to tell the surgeon. You paid a LOT of money for this and he should be able to fix whatever you’re not happy with.”
But the thing to realize here is that: a) you can only do so much, and I kind of trust that the doctor did all he could, and b) if I have to go through the pain and discomfort of yet another surgery (not to mention cover the additional cost of reserving another operating room and anesthesiologist, which both aren’t covered by the surgeon), the very thought of it makes me want to dive headlong through my third-floor window and plummet skull-first into the concrete below.
I just can’t bear the thought, especially after going through the insane pain, expense, stress, and struggle of having two major surgeries in the span of 11 months.
But if all of this… if all I struggled DECADES to get to and get through... isn’t enough, then what do I do? There is nothing left for me that I’m planning on. There is nothing I can look forward to for solace.
Before the surgeries I had, I was depressed, and hurting, and upset at my situation in the world, BUT I lived with the constant hope that once I got these surgeries taken care of, it would be enough for me, and I would feel better.
Now that these surgeries are behind me, and there is nothing else I can point to that will help me live my life and help me fit my new self and my new life seamlessly into the world, I am beyond depressed. I am completely forlorn and utterly hollowed out. I am supremely bereft of hope. Because I know now, FOR CERTAIN, that no matter what I do and no matter what I struggle to achieve when it comes to this transition, that it’s not EVER going to be enough. People are ALWAYS going to see me as something I’m not. I’m ALWAYS GOING TO FEEL WRONG… ALWAYS. There is NOTHING MORE I CAN DO ABOUT THIS.
And with all of this weighing on me, I can’t think straight, I can’t be social. I hole myself up and avoid everything and everyone. I struggle just to make it through the work day and be constructive and it is enormously tasking just to do that. I have never felt this hopeless in my life. I have never felt this upset in my life. I’m trying to fight on and do whatever is next for me, but I have no idea what that even is, because with this plan there wasn’t another step. There were the two major, difficult steps that I took, and now there is nothing. There’s just me contending with the results and trying not to break down every other minute of the day… which is even more difficult every time I look in the mirror.
I feel completely crushed and I don’t know what I can do to make me feel better, if there is anything at all. It hurts in ways I can’t even describe. I feel like my life has careened into a dead end. How do you recover from this? What do you do next?
Well, if you’re me, you continue to go to therapy, and work on your weight and your overall health, and hope there is still some miraculous healing that’s going to take place and things can somehow still get better. What else is there to do? I’m stumbling like a beat-up zombie through the world at this point, trying to find any source of joy I can in what has suddenly turned into the most excruciating and painful time of my life.
And for those who say, “Well, you just need to learn to accept it,” well, they just need to learn what it is to be trans and about the pain that comes with it. They need to learn that THIS is what the experience is… you CANNOT accept it, because if you COULD accept feeling SO off and SO misunderstood all of the time, then you wouldn’t be trans. It is the VERY DEFINITION of what it is. You feel wrong. Always. I hoped that this would make me feel not wrong, and while the first surgery did to a big extent, it’s still not right. It’s STILL all wrong. It’s all wrong and I don’t know how to make it better.
THAT is what the experience of being trans is in a nutshell. Dealing with these feelings and trying to just hold on in the middle of a raging tempest. Though why I’m holding on at this point is anybody’s guess. Yet, I do. I honestly don’t know what else there is to do.
All the best to you.
As an addendum to this post, actually writing this stuff down and getting it out of my head and onto “paper” has helped a little. I felt a bit of an uptick in my attitude from a few days ago when I first spit all of this out of my brain. I’m still plodding on the best I can and trying to take the best care of myself… even when the depression hit so violently that I heard cigarettes calling to me again after spending years with the habit pretty much kicked. I was just looking for that stress relief again, and, really, a distraction. It says something that I haven’t gone back to them yet, like so many other trans people do… because, let’s face it, when you have no hope, do you care about the damage that nicotine is inflicting upon you? Apparently I'm hanging in there enough to not go back down that path.
That said, I’m still not good, but I’m a smidge better than when I wrote this post initally. This being a blog about the whole trans experience, though, I felt it important to share the rawness of it all.
One final thing. Yes, I’m partially destroyed at this point, but I still do realize that people have gone through worse than this and that I do not hold a monopoly on life struggles. This is just my struggle… and while there are worse things to go through, it doesn’t make what I and other trans people are contending with any fun at all. In fact, it’s still pretty fantastically terrible.
Thanks for reading.
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