ally

December 21, 2019

It is surprisingly hard to think something real
when every indication, every word, all you feel
tells you that that must not be the case.
There's no easy way to make yourself face
that which your emotions continually deny,
no matter how true you know it to be.
                 But why
must all these contradictions claim events
that mean the most to us? What prevents
them from taking the unimportant? The small?
Is the import just to big? Can we not fit all
of the thing in our heads? Are we too weak?
Is the life-changing too vast to explore, to seek
out every corner?
Have you considered that your constant seeking
may be the problem? That your anxieties leaking
all over may be what's preventing you
from recognizing what's actually true:
you can do things for yourself. It's allowed.
It also doesn't help that there were so many delays.
The scheduler losing my application, and me counting days
after those who consulted after me got their dates;
The mishap of the letters, and me rushing past gates
and their keepers; countless thoughts of countless regrets —
regrets which hadn't yet happened — as mom frets
that maybe I will wind up hating my new body.
And why not? Why not fret? Surgery! How gaudy.
I fight with myself enough over how this surgery
is plastic, how I'm just doing something sugary
to somehow make myself somewhat more appealing.
How trite. How selfish. How lame. How revealing
of my bottomless shallowness.
Your saving grace being, as always, dysphoria:
more than any cough or cold, more than your chorea,
it provided you with a problem. Something fixable.
It gave you a tangible solution to something integral
that plagued you.
That I had something I could concrete at which to point
that would be fixed by this act, I could thus annoint
it as somehow more worthy, something worth doing.
If I could go through some process of ungluing,
excise this thing from myself I might become whole
in some way never before imagined.
                Ah, but the toll.
There must always some arbitrary price to pay ---
Self-actualization must never be free --- and hey,
Everything in society must come with a reason.
To come up with letters, proof, for that season
of change must serve some sort of divine end.
To wait eighteen long months, to refuse to bend
to others' whims...
You got your letters, you got your date, you did it.
You did your labor, you did your time. They let you fidget
and twist in the wind. Hell, they did it to you twice.
Your letters only good for one year, you had to ask nice
for a second set.
Yes.
   To preempt your 'why', I followed my own advice:
If I feel the same when I'm depressed as I do when I feel nice,
It's a thing worth doing. Eighteen months is time enough
to let at least two depressive cycles call my own bluff.
When they did not, when I panicked at having to reapply
and still pulled through in time, well, no need to justify
my actions any further. That's when it all became real.
That's when I was in. That's when I could tell just by feel
that I was ready for this change. I wasn't ready ready,
but I was ready enough to come off as rock steady
when I called the surgeon's office. I was visibly confident,
even at the pre-operative appointments, totally cognizant
that I didn't deserve this.
Whether or not you deserve this is not up for debate.
Not because you do or don't so much as because the hand fate
dealt you. You had the job, you had the insurance, the means.
You made the call. You took the step. You passed the screens.
You did this.