I so rarely write anymore, and when I do it is in the short bursts of social media, or it is in private, by hand, trying to think through the details of this or that social entanglement or long-term plan or juggling of too many myopic tasks. it used to be that this, the direct address to some little text box online, would be where my interior life truly lived.

I tried again the other night to find an old internet friend from those days, Wesley Oliver from Minneapolis, who even trekked all the way out to my suburban hometown to meet me all those years ago, who I can no longer figure out any way to contact. When I was still figuring out so much of who I was (I still am, I still am), I would talk to him at 3 in the morning, or to Brandon, or to an assortment of forums and comments sections, or I would write long posts about my feelings and about my life. I don’t do quite the same kind of writing anymore; everything in my life, it seems, is rushed. but I find myself feeling the impulse again. maybe it’s because it’s something I do when I’m alone and without obligations, and that is a state I find myself in so rarely these days. but right now i’m sick, and the weather tonight is a horror movie, so I’m stuck inside and sitting on my hands. so I’m typing again.

scrolling through my feed to see what people are doing, I realize I’ve finally hit an age where quite a few of them have children, where there are pictures of different babies right in a row.

(content note: reproductive health)
soon enough I will have gone through, over the course of less than a year, the process of finally, finally getting a diagnosis for the sometimes really debilitating chronic pain I’ve had for years, then trying an intense new drug and physical therapy, and then ultimately deciding to get my uterus surgically removed. assuming I can make it through the administrative snarls before me, I will be getting a hysterectomy on March 19th.

it’s strangely disorienting to mourn the possibility of something you already knew you did not want. it feels like throwing out the key to an old apartment that you knew you were never going to go back to, but somehow you felt like you should have the option, just in case.

I find myself wondering if my mother wanted me. I find myself remembering the last time I held the fantasy of being a mother — I was 19 and very in love with a boy just a couple of years older who seemed very much like an adult to me then. I wanted to have his children, three of them, I had dreams about them. I remember a daughter named Mina who played the violin and liked to keep her hair in a long French braid. Mina has never been born, at least in this world. I never really learned how to do a French braid anyway.

When I first made the decision, tentatively, I had dreams about being pregnant. I think my body wondered what it would be like. It makes me think of being allergic to a food you don’t like, but still sometimes wondering how it tastes. The finality of the thing sets off my commitment phobia’s alarm bells; I’d planned on simply never getting around to having children—a much more passive route to the same end tally. I feel certain. I just also feel afraid. My anxiety-riddled brain is on some level convinced that I will die during a routine operation, or that some nightmareish statistical improbability will come to haunt me in its aftermath, but I know that these fears are that: fear. I have accepted the possibility that this will not help, that the pain that has twisted itself up into the core of me may not subside, it may not even lessen, but there is enough of a chance of improvement that it is worth the attempt.

and I do feel the cost is worth it. but that does not mean it is not worthy of some sadness. I am trying to allow myself to mourn this, without misinterpreting the unpleasant feeling as a sign that I am not taking the right course. I look at my friends’ cute babies on the internet and I feel happy for them, and I feel a bittersweetness. closing a door can mean choosing a path, can be a part of living a more deliberately sculpted life. in order to move forward, one must choose one direction out of many. and so I suppose I am feeling the loss of all the other ways I could have gone.