The morning of your gender-affirming top surgery

The morning of your gender-affirming top surgery, while in the shower, applying the Hibiclens for the last time in preparation, you wonder if you’ve made a mistake.

This is a huge undertaking, and for some reason, your anxiety, often triggered by saying something slightly embarrassing, is nowhere to be found.

Suppose you had a roller derby bout that afternoon, for example. In that case, you’d at least have cold sweats, trouble eating, maybe some anxiety diarrhea, and would have to distract yourself by binging early-season Supernatural.

But as you soap yourself, you realize that your life until now has been the anxiety. Getting gender-affirming top surgery feels like the tangible solution to that ongoing problem of not being able to look at yourself in the mirror or feeling like you are separated from your own body.

Doing nothing feels like accepting dysphoria as a part of yourself; doing something feels like it could mean loving yourself as a complete being. Temporary discomfort for a lifetime of euphoria; that’s the goal.

It is then that you know with all your being that you know with all your heart, that you are doing the right thing. And you sigh in anticipatory relief.