I want to thank everyone that's taken the time to reach out to me and hold my hand.
Its now Day 12 and i'm starting to see a little bit more of the old me each day.
Maybe its a mixture of regret, the realization that i went too far, or maybe it is postoperative depression... i dont know...
The idea that FFS looks more radical than it actually is in the beginning and then it gradually looks more subtle was the goal...
I had a choice of philosophy and in the end I chose the "You want to look like you" philosophy. There was a chaotic period of three months of deliberating over what I wanted to do and i had many alternatives.
1. To do gradual FFS over time. this would have taken longer and involved more thought processes. Logistically it also would have meant making long-distance travel plans. at the time we were so anxious and we thought we were ready.
this is the piece-by-piece approach- Subtle rhinoplasty, just minor tweaking here and there, and as for the great source of unhappiness with my face- my long chin - i had originally considered going to San Francisco, to Dr. Ousterhout, for just a chin procedure, but that procedure cost around $15,000 and I decided that it was probably too much money if Dr. Spiegel could do the same procedure.
I don't know but according to the doctor in Boston, there is very little that can be done with long chins. He had to make an OR decision at the last minute of what to do....
The gradual, piece-by-piece approach was now, looking back on this year, the most sound and safest approach... It would have taken longer, involved getting on a plane probably, involved a lot more paperwork. I may have not been able to do anything for a year, and when you're looking at individual procedures, then you wonder if you need FFS doctors at all for them, that you could possibly just go to a rhinoplasty surgeon and get a little tweak...
2. Do nothing. I was at a place before I went up to Boston where I was unusually very happy with what I was seeing in the mirror. I had just gotten a tanning product that dramatically, at least in my eyes, changed the way I felt about myself. My confidence level was actually rising. My last weeks with the old face, aside from the fact I couldn't see (my eyes since the beginning of the year have been terrible) were not all bad.
So I was at a place that was okay. It wouldn't have killed me to wait. I was on estrogen and gradually the estrogen would have begun to change my face. Even with my long chin (the obsessive Body Dysmorphic feature) it looked much better when I tanned my face. Ironically i still have a chin that i don't like, because we couldn't take off half, so we're reacting to everything the exact same way we did before.
Even when it comes to makeup, my approach has not changed, which may indicate that actually not that much of a change was made.. that it was all subtle enough, that even the face is in essence still the same.
3. Having the FFS.... which was what we did.
btw sorry this is so long
What I've learned:
1. That when we go in for plastic surgery or FFS or any kind of change, it is VERY SERIOUS and you must strongly consider that you might get something new and then wish you had the old one back. This was unheard of before, but now it is all too real of a feeling. I don't know if with time I'll become fully adjusted to what happened....
2. Becoming obsessed about one feature is always unhealthy. For me it was my chin, and becuase of that, we wound up asking for a whole new face, or at least alterations to the old one. It is called Body Dysmorphic Disorder, and it is dangerous. Plastic surgery does not seem like the solution to someone that has traits of BDD.... it might seem that surgery will make all your problems go away, but it is never that easy or that simple.
3. Having surgery hurts. People had said this was painless. Even the doctor did. I don't know what point of reference he was speaking from, but you don't ever listen to the doctor... even the laser hair removal specialists say that their procedures are just "a tingle" or that they are painless. They haven't been through it and most of them are cisgender women who never had the problems we had. It is TEN- TWENTY times more painful to have these procedures done.... so just don't believe everything you hear.... its surgery, its going to hurt. I said I was prepared for the worst but I had no idea what I was getting myself into so I couldn't possibly know what it would feel like...
4. that faces don't really matter. That a transition should be about just LIVING your life as a female... i never got this, i never understood it.... for me it was always, "Well, I'll stay James unless i can be pretty and then I'll become a woman." NO NO NO NO NO NO NO -
Transition and being transgender has absolutely NOTHING to do with standrads of beauty, with perfection, with glamour.... its about living your life, its about being yourself, and by yourself, I never realized this before, but being yourself does not mean Looking perfectly the way you envisioned your female identity to look like - its a Faceless state of mind... its a conception of a new reality - that you are female, not a drag queen, not a cross-dresser, not ambiguous, not anything else but a woman....
IF YOU BELIEVE IT, OTHER PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE IT TOO. Its hard for me to understand how I could be a woman without looking like one, or without looking like the fantasy we have in our mind of how we want to look... but the truth and the reality is that eventually, we need to just let go... we need to let go of all of the superificial crap, and allow our spirits to heal, allow our spirit to live....
and you don't need a face to have a spirit. You don't even need to look like a woman to be one. You need to believe it, and once you do, then that's all that matters.
