Another sleepless night, tossing and turning in bed. Restless and sleepless despite my physical tiredness.
It’s my emotions. So similar to the couple of days prior to my gender-affirming top-surgery in January 2023 and so similar to the last couple of days in Spain before moving to California in January 2016.
The main feeling I had then and have now is that, at this point, I’m ready. Ready and impatient. I feel like I’m standing on a threshold, about to take a step that will forever change some important things about me and/or my life, and that at this point I just can’t wait to step over that threshold and be on the other side.
Just as for that big move from Europe to California in January 2016 and my masculinizing mastectomy in January 2023, the weeks and months leading up to the decision and to actually getting everything ready for the decision to become reality were hectic and stressful, with so many practical things to get done and so many issues to solve that one almost forgets the reason, the meaning of the step. The goal, from the practical viewpoint, is clear: and that keeps me going and allows me to get everything I need done from the practical viewpoint. But it’s only the last couple days before the step over the threshold that, for me, the deeper reason or meaning of that step come more fully to my senses again. It’s in those last couple days before the step that I really feel, on the one hand, the importance of the decision for me and, on the other hand, the need to do some rituals to mark and celebrate this step, these last moments before an irreversible change.
As I did in January 2016 and in January 2023, today as well I will be doing something that feels special and meaningful to me in general but also to me particularly as relates to this step. This afternoon, I will be going to “the city” to visit the Christmas Market first with the gender-expansive gay guy from the chorus with whom I had hooked up and then by myself; and then I might join him and some others for a movie night at his place in the evening.
If I don’t visit the Christmas Market today, I probably won’t be able to see it again before it closes this year. This year more than others, with the gay men’s chorus holiday performances, Thanksgiving with my dear running friend & his wife, and Friendsgiving with one of my queer families, I have felt not only the importance but also the real opportunity of making new, positive memories around the holidays: so going (back) to the Christmas Market today, both in pleasant company and by myself, feels like a delicate, profound, and important ritual for me today, since then the market will close before I’ve recovered enough from tomorrow’s surgery.
Then, there’s the symbolic importance of spending some time today with a gender-expansive gay guy and, in particular, someone with whom I’ve recently had physical & sexual intimacy. My double procedure tomorrow is both gender-affirmation and birth-control, so spending the day with him, and then possibly with some other gay guys for movie night, seems particularly appropriate for this surgery: it feels right to me.
After tomorrow’s procedure, I will no longer get any menstrual bleedings and no longer risk getting pregnant: having lived with these two realities for a quarter of a century, I can hardly imagine how that will be, how it will feel. But I imagine that, at least in some ways, it might help me feel more like a “gay boy”…
The Little Prince and the Fox 