A leap of faith.

The hardest thing about transition is trusting yourself that you’re making the best decisions possible. None of us really know for sure what the future holds and what will happen next. We’re always taking a leap of faith.

Yeah, uh, this is a post about my upcoming Facial Feminisation Surgery…

In about a week’s time I’ll be going under the knife with FacialTeam in Spain. They’ll be burring down and refining my forehead down, popping out some hair follicles and using it to fill in my hair line, and then trimming down my trachea a little too. Nothing too extreme, just enough to tone down the dysphoria to a much more gentle level.

As you can imagine, I’m feeling a lot of doubt and worries about it. I know about all the risks and issues that could come up and I’m aware of how intense the healing process can be. Sometimes the swelling makes the dysphoria worse before it gets better! I worry about the scarring and any hair loss! I worry about any loss of sensation! But just like with bottom surgery, I have to compare these risks to what I could gain from going through the process. Recovery from that was difficult and uncomfortable at times, but it has generally improved the way I see and feel about my own body, which makes it all worth it in the end.

So I’m trying to hope for the same thing here.

Even just taking the plunge of picking a new name, changing my appearance, coming out to people around me, and eventually starting hormone therapy, all involved these leaps of faith. I had to hope, I had to believe, that it would make things better for me overall. And I think generally it has. There was a chance these things didn’t work out of course, but I had to have a go and try and do the scary things. I owed it to myself to at least try.

Even outside of transition, I have to try and do these scary things. Getting my brain checked for a certain condition was terrifying but worth it. Asking out my boyfriends and eventually telling them I love them was frightening. Starting EMDR therapy and facing the things from my past is perhaps the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and to be honest I’m petrified of restarting the process.

This is mainly a note to self. To try and encourage myself to be brave. To not ring up the surgery clinic and cancel and run away and hide in my duvet for a month. I gotta stand up, legs trembling, and keep walking forwards. Dare to do the things that frighten me to my core. They’re often the things that are the most worth it.