Wednesday, July 11th, 2012
Two weeks since surgery, fifth day home, and I inhabit a profound placidity new to my experience. I feel languorous, fundamentally undriven, deeply calm. Post-surgery energy deficit? The (at last) natural plunging of my testosterone level to near zero? The end of decades of the unrelenting tension of projecting masculinity into the world? Perhaps all three. And of course it is summer and I am home alone, drifting through silent recuperative days. For the first time in my life, in a way, I am at rest. How odd.
When and how and why will I move again? I'm not sure. I feel that I am waiting to see who I am; from that will follow what I will do...when I feel a little stronger again.
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Sunday, July 15th, 2012
I am not yet friends with my new parts. They still feel variously numb, itchy, prickly, tender and sore. They are still bruised and swollen, and still full of stitches, some of which will take up to two months to disolve. Also, my labia minora still look like an untreated wound. It's gory in there. Ew. I sent a couple of anxious phone-pictures to the clinic the other day and got back a reassuring e-mail: looks normal, you're healing on schedule; keep yourself very clean, keep dilating four times a day, and be patient.
OK. OK, I can do that. But I'll tell you what: I am *working* for this. Whatever good comes of it will be hard-won and well-earned. Fuck yeah.
There is one astonishing thing so far about my new parts: the endlessly renewable marvel of standing and looking at myself naked in the mirror. No more need to cover up. The man parts are gone! In their place, an incomprehensible miracle: the gentle bifurcated pubic swell, curving back and away. Every time I look, still, my brows contract in the middle. Really? I mean, *really*? It can't be. But it is...look again. *Really*? Better look again... Fifty years is a long time - it is going to take a while longer to believe this is true.
Then there is the joy of being testicle-free. No more testosterone! I did not fully realize, before, how much I was stoically enduring on account of that potent molecule. I have experienced, post-surgery, a sudden advance in the feminization of my whole body. My muscles have lost mass and gotten softer. My skin feels softer too. The body hair I shaved off right before surgery is growing back so fine as to be in most places effectively invisible. My little A-cup cuties have gotten noticeably fuller. Yes, yes, yes, to all these lovely changes.
Yesterday, looking at myself at various angles in two mirrors, I saw myself more completely as a woman than ever before: a tall, big-boned, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, thin-haired quirky-faced woman, but a woman nonetheless, and honey, not half-bad looking either. Chances of further surgery are diminishing...maybe just hairline and Adam's apple, my two most significantly masculine facial features, and no particular rush. I may not need even that, because I feel my femininity shining out of me more strongly all the time. It is in the limber grace my body continues to discover; it is in the way I can feel the animation of my face more fully reflecting the quicksilver dapple of my mood and mind; it is in the new softer music my voice has of late been finding. As I continue to open to the light, how can I fail to express "woman" more and more fully? I *am* a woman, and at last I am free to be. My joyful flowering continues. :-)
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