The Big Chop

I am delighted to announce that I have had top surgery! The surgery and initial recovery have gone exceedingly well, and I am SO happy and excited to share this good news!

For those of you who have followed me on social media, the surgery itself is not a surprise. :) And if you're new - or just missed me talking about it (totally fine - I talk a lot sometimes!) - I hope you find this announcement to be fairly unsurprising. 😊

I decided to keep the surgery and initial recovery hush-hush on social media. I didn't want to feel overwhelmed by attention right after a large medical procedure! Even well-wishes can become stressful for me, so I chose to reduce distraction and focus only on myself. :) Happily this has worked out well. I have had no surgical complications, and my healing trajectory is faster than average!

(CW: ED, dysphoria, body dysmorphia)

Growing breasts was traumatic for me. I was still a kid when it started, but I knew immediately it wasn't what I wanted, and that feeling never left - was just suppressed, turned into subterranean pain. I gave myself heatstroke as a preteen because I refused to remove the jacket that hid my chest. I developed an eating disorder as a teenager. As an adult I worked very hard to heal my relationships with food and with my body, but still experienced varying levels of dysmorphia and self-hatred for my body. It was only relatively recently, when I learned that surgeons had developed gender-affirming techniques for nonbinary patients, that I began to believe that I could align my body with the way I had always felt it should be. This unlocked a cascade of realizations that I *could* be not-a-woman, that I *could* get treatment to heal a very old hurt.

(For clarity: I am not a man. Gender is complicated. I am somewhere in the nonbinary / genderfluid region of experience. The type of surgery I've had was chosen to reflect my self-image; I still have some breast tissue, I have living nipples instead of a skin graft, and I did not opt for a “masculinized” chest contour.)

When I took these photos, I cried tears of happiness. I did not fully realize how much pain I carried on my chest, or how a surgery - a big cut! - could actually *heal* me. Since surgery, so many of my dysmorphic feelings for my body have dissipated, and I have realized that I had transferred the pain of the "wrong" body into other parts of me that I thought I could control - like shrinking myself through disordered eating.

(End CW.)

I am so excited for the next chapter. As I recover, I can slowly return to the lifting that I love. I am thrilled to explore new horizons of art, bodybuilding, movement, and love, free of the shackles of a warped self-image. I am excited to meet the me that will be here in a year, two years, ten years, twenty. I hope you are too. :)