This Is It

It's been a week since my surgery, and the experience since has been a bit like falling out of linear time. Everything shifted, slowed down, became textured. When I got tired of the inane surface-y aspects of the experience (magazines, movies, repeat), I had plenty of time to contemplate the nature of change itself, as well as my relationship with my body.

Change: the ultimate poke at death anxiety, the very thing that (paradoxically, perfectly) alerts us to the fact of being alive. Waking up in a changed body is kind of like waking up in a new home. There's some excitement, some fear, some warped cognitive translation so that the wires get crossed and sometimes the excitement is read as fear. There's a sense of foreign-ness mixed in with a sense of self, which is really the ultimate highlight of impermanence - something that makes most of us wildly uncomfortable; something so rich with potential it should be mined wherever we find it.

I saw my chest for the first time when the drains came out a couple of days ago. At the time, my body and I were having a rough time of it: I spent most of that day knocked out by a relatively mysterious nausea/vomiting/abdominal pain situation that reminded me of how fragile this fortress can be. Before the worst of it, I was in my doctor's office, feeling a little scared as he unwrapped the bandages for the first time. I knew there was a possibility of "deformity" which - of course - is scary as hell, and I waited nervously as he unwrapped me like a present to myself. After he pulled the drains out (really no big deal at all - wasn't on any pain medication at that point and barely felt it) he had me look down at myself before he put on new bandages. Wow, I thought, wow. Is this me? It looked good, the grafts had taken, my chest smooth like a man's. I felt like a myth. I felt like I was bearing a kind of witness I could never have imagined.

So, this is it. I have been reminded of my own freefall through this beautiful thing we call life, and I plan on devoting some time to really becoming familiar with the nature of liminal space. I think a lot of answers can be found here. I'll keep you posted.