Reeling in Recovery

In the tomes of literature I received from the doctor’s office prior to my facial surgery in November, I read a few things about how patients should try their best to stay positive in the weeks following surgery, and that depression or regret is natural. I certainly felt a tinge of that from the first surgery I had in contending with this gender bullshit that is the utter bane of my existence, but at least with my bottom surgery I also had the feeling that part of me was finally right… so there was a bit of internal harmony that drowned out most of the depression I felt when I was laid up, cloistered and healing.

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.

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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.

Here I Am

Talk about leaving things in a cliffhanger. I mean, I post over five months ago about how I’m going to have THE surgery… about how I’m getting ready to take THE biggest and most profound step I’ve ever taken… and then I don’t write for almost half a year.

Well, you see, the thing is… it’s taken me that long to even BEGIN to know what to say about it.

I had surgery on December 27, 2017. It went fairly well. I mean, I’m still healing, so we won’t know final results for another few months or so, but at this point in the process and with what I’ve gone through so far, I’m pretty, amazingly happy.

There have been some complications, but nothing all too major as far as I can tell. Mostly it’s simply about dealing with the simmering frustration that comes with recovery. You finally reach a point where you almost feel back to normal, but you’re not quite there yet. You’re just on the wide periphery of healed, and the closer you get to the core of fully better, the more the impatience nags at you.

All that said, I still really don’t know what to write about. I don’t know how to sum any of it up. I have so much to say about it to the point where I can’t get anything out. It’s like a tidal wave of thoughts are trying to escape my brain through a keyhole, and it’s so excessive that it just gets dammed up.

What I do know is this…. I’m happy that I’ve had the surgery. In fact, I’m beyond ecstatic. I can’t even describe how much better, and clear-headed, and content, and giddy, and confident this has made me. Even with the complications. It’s like someone has been screaming at me for the past few decades and it’s finally stopped. Know that car alarm that goes off for WAY too long and it starts to drive you slowly insane? Imagine that going on for DECADES… then imagine it stopping. THAT is how I feel right now. A thought that constantly entered my mind in the first few weeks of this new experience was: I don’t know how to be this happy.

I truly didn't, and I'm still trying to figure out how to be.

This is all just SO very different, and even I have a difficult time wrapping my head around it. At times I don’t even think it’s real. It’s like I think I’ve somehow fooled myself and suddenly I’ll be reverted back to what I was. All my life I’d imagine SO intently what I SO desperately sought… I’d visualize it to SUCH a degree that I could almost fool myself into believing this blissful lie. Like if I concentrated hard enough, I could pretend I was already fixed.

But then, sooner or later, reality would come crashing in and destroy this illusion I so desperately tried to get lost in.

But… this time…. this time it is real. This time the illusion is that I’ll revert back to that painful feeling. This time the illusion is that I’ll ever have to feel that way again.

THIS is what this experience is like. It is SUCH a hard thing to encapsulate, and I try to even do it a modicum of justice with my description on this page.

Yet, with all of this said, there’s a bad side to it too. You see, I still very much and near unmistakably look like a man, even when I try to present as female. Now, I’m not the most girly of girls, and to be honest, I really prefer jeans and t-shrits over anything more fancy. I’ve always strived for comfort more than anything else. And what would be read as “comfort” on other women, gets read as “completely male” on me.

And even if I play it up… even if I throw on a dress and try my best to appear as “feminine” as possible to people who meet me, I still come across as male.

This makes me hide. Because it’s easier to hide than to deal with the disparity between my perception and the world’s. If I’m not trying, then it hurts less than if I try and still get the same treatment. It’s like my mind can justify it by saying, “Well, I’m not trying, so it’s not as bad.”

And so I hide. Both in the way that I dress, and in the fact that I barely leave my apartment and have become, for all intents and purposes, a shut-in.

My hiding has become even worse since surgery. Because when I’m here, alone, at home, I am INSANELY happy. When I’m not dealing with what the world reflects back at me, I am INSANELY happy. It’s like a drug, and all I want to do is feed that addiction and live in this altered state of reality, because the other version, the REAL version that lurks outside my door, is so very much more painful and biting.

Before surgery, I still had the pain of feeling wrong, so I would hide but still go out and do things to try to deal with and distract myself from this pain. Now that this pain doesn’t exist, it is VERY difficult for me to try to move in and around other people. I don’t even leave the house to go to work, because I can work from home pretty much any day I want to… and lately it’s been every single day. I haven’t been to the office in weeks. I’m telling myself that I’m going in tomorrow. I see even just telling myself this as a sign of progress toward eventually getting out into the world again… but we’ll see if I leave the house tomorrow morning.

Maybe this is only a temporary thing, though. Maybe I just need to be with this and with my new self for a time and process it all. I’m not certain, but I know that I’m still planning for the future and trying to find a way I can move more easily in the world… so that’s good, because at least I’m still looking out there. Maybe someday soon I’ll be a part of it again.

Until then, I shall stay in my happy little bubble.

Things could most certainly be worse.

All the best to you. Always.

The Retreat

As we all know, life can tend to get a little nuts. From time to time we all feel like we’re caught in the clutches of a raging shitstorm, getting battered and tossed about like we’re out to sea, riding through a hurricane in a dinghy.

It’s during these times, when you’re getting hit with blow after blow and you’re stumbling and reeling in every misguided direction, that you need to stop everything, slow it all down, and regroup.

When 2011 began, I was caught in such a maelstrom. I was being whipped and whooped by life, no matter which way I turned. In an effort that I thought would cultivate momentum and push me through the beating, I blindly plodded forward, making poor decision after poor decision and completely losing myself in the process. I was essentially a shattered shell of a person as last year began, and when something is shattered, you have two choices: either you throw it all out, OR you start the laborious process of piecing it all back together again. Since I didn’t really want to toss away my existence, I chose the latter route.

So, how do you start putting your life and your own self back together? Well, the very first thing you have to do is to get out of the storm. You have to retreat. You have to seek shelter. It’s impossible to build anything in the middle of a torrent.

For me this meant completely pulling back from social interactions and from people in general. Not that all of the people in my life were causing problems for me or anything like that, it was just that they all contributed to this din that was slowly crushing me. I had to remove myself from it and find center again. I had to find myself again, specifically the self that existed outside of all exterior influences. In short, I had to quiet all the noise so that I could better listen to the voice inside me that was growing more and more faint.

So, this past year I spent a whole hell of a lot of time alone. Not that I was secluded like a shut-in (side note: “Secluded Like a Shut-In” would be an excellent name for an album), but my social interactions were extremely limited. It was a lonely year, it was a sad year, and it was a very tough year to get through. By the end of it, however, I had quit smoking, I had lost weight, and I had saved a small but decent-sized amount of money. Most importantly, though, I had found my center again. I found the parts of me that were completely lost. I reestablished my identity on my own terms by figuring out who I was and who I wanted to be, and through that I regained my confidence.

I simply cannot stress enough how much confidence governs one’s life. As an example, I was on a trip once, cruising along on an empty mountain road, when I got hit with a mild panic attack that caused me to suddenly question my driving ability. Now I consider myself to be an above average driver, so it’s not like I had any doubts about this stuff before. It was just a rare occurrence that struck me one afternoon, and because of it, not surprisingly, I started to drive a little less straight, I had to pay a lot more attention, and the very simple act of rolling along this lonely, serene mountain road became a herculean task.

To get past this, I first had to stop these insane thoughts from coming at me. Then I had to simply trust myself again. I had to remind myself that I’ve spent two decades and hundreds of thousands of miles behind the wheel of a car. I had to know that I could do this and that it really was no big deal. Once I did that, once I trusted in myself, I didn’t have to think about the process of driving at all, and I just coasted along merrily.

The point to all of this, is that when you don’t trust yourself, everything gets 100 times more difficult, and when last year began I had absolutely zero trust in myself. So I retreated from everything, pulled away from most, and wound up regaining my edge, my mojo, or whatever other word you want to use for it. I began trusting not only in myself again, but also in who I am. By doing this, I rediscovered the following things about me.

Your smile is endearing.

You’re quick and you’re clever.

You can make people laugh.

You’re a delightful smart ass.

You can handle what life throws you.

You don’t care a smidge about what people who are unimportant to you think about you.

You can laugh at yourself and at the problems of day-to-day life.

You are able to understand deeply and love unconditionally.

You are a fountain of untapped potential.

You are worthy of any and all kinds of love.

And finally…

There is no one else exactly quite like you. Embrace it.

Yeah, 2011 was a BRUTAL year for me, but wow was it important. I think you can probably understand why.

I hope all is well in your world, that you know all of the many good things about you, and that you are feeling supremely confident. There really is no other way to live.