October 6, 2020

Looks like retrograde is coming early for me.

Once upon a time, after my sexual liberation from my mediocre relationship after my failed sexless marriage I talked about my vagina at work a lot.

To the point where one of the girls at work made a snide comment, verbatim, “here comes Sarah to talk about her vagina again.”

Hush sis, just because yours is lonely, don’t be getting mad at mine.

I have also spent a lot of time explaining and exploring Poland’s Syndrome.

I have that.

I talk about my boobs a lot too.

In the immortal words of the Teletubbies, “again, again.”

Cliff’s notes, I was born without my pectoral muscles on my right side and since fat will not grow on bone, I never grew a tit where a tit oughta be.

Earned me the nickname jellyboob in high school and is probably predominantly responsible for my rock bottom self esteem and crushing body dysmorphia. I had to wear a chicken cutlet prosthesis until I could go for surgery, so like 2 years.

And yet, I strip. I date. I do things.

That’s kinda my existence in a nutshell. Missing something really normal and important, do things anyways.

I am the girl who worked at the strip club right after physio so I could rent an apartment and get out of my marriage even though I was in insane amounts of pain and could barely walk right. If it needs doing, I do it.

I have had implants since I was 16. Several over the years, the last ones being 2011.

The last few years I have been feeling not so great.

I was in a car wreck in 2009, my knees hurt all the time, my neck too, I function at a 3 or 4 on the pain scale every day and it spikes bad a few times a month.

I figured this was just life now.

But lately it has been so much worse. And I can’t begin to tell you when it started.

I did notice this last trip to Newfoundland that drinking a drink or 3 knocked my pain down to a very manageable 1 or 2, then I would get drunk and then hungover and regret it. Drinking truly is borrowing tomorrow’s happiness.

I had previously chalked my health problems up to the amount of drinking I did for the 2+ years I lived there. I was technically chronically hungover. But I stopped last November, I should feel kinda better by now. I also quit smoking a year ago in June.

I now have this sneaking suspicion that a fairly large part of my drinking problem was pain management.

I cannot enumerate the amount of times I have woken up over the last year with horrible pain in my hips and lower back. But it must be the car wreck right? I damaged my pelvis, I am getting older.

Driving 3 days made me feel like my shoulders were dislocated and somehow on fire. My knees swelled up to half cantaloupes. It wasn’t like this the times before.

Then I started thinking about all the times I swam at the quarry and how bad ticks were those years. Do I have Lyme’s disease? I looked up the symptoms and a few are on point. Headaches, vertigo, dizziness, joint pain. But there’s more, that don’t need to be discussed here, belly tings. Yucky hurty belly tings.

About a month ago I was watching Botched with my Lexi girl in the kitchen. The girl who ‘won’ Flava of Love was on asking to get her implants removed. I say won, because did anyone really win anything there?

Anyways, she described the symptoms of breast implant illness.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. But in the last 24 hours I have done a little research and it has become a very real possibility.

I think what hit me the hardest was ‘misdiagnosed Lyme’s disease’. And I have 8 out of the top 10.

My tits are not currently great. They never were. I had a baby goat get rejected by her mama about 3 nights after I had surgery. She ended up in my coat and kicked my compression bandages off on the way to the house, by the time I got her fed and settled I was too tired to look after myself and as a result my left tit sits lower than my right, noticeably so.

Add to that the fact that my last set of implants were a result of my doctor bribing me out of my eating disorder. If I could gain and maintain weight, she would give me a referral and 50% of the cost would be covered. Gotta love Canadian healthcare.

But it worked, I have since gained more weight and since fat loves to grow on muscle, I am a full cup size heavier on the left as well.

I have been back and forth about getting them fixed, even going so far as to have a consultation with an incredible surgeon, but …

There is always a but…

Do I go through this, the recovery and risk a lot of scarring to still be imperfect?

Can’t I just love myself as is?

I can, mostly. I try to anyways.

I think perfection is not in the cards for me as far as tits go.

But what if these things are making me sick?

I should be excited by the idea of being a normal, pain free human being again. And if this is it, then yes please.

By most accounts once they are out life gets immediately and noticeably better.

But can I live without tits? Do I risk getting a new set and going through this again?

What if that isn’t an option?

2 jellyboobs instead of one?

I want to go back to school in January, is this going to fuck with that? why is that every time I make a life decision and start working towards it something gets incredibly fucky?

I am so close to having a breakdown and a tantrum at the same time.

I haven’t written much lately. I think the big delete I did kinda knocked the wind out of me. Plus BLM and all the injustices and crazy circus shit going on south of the border made me feel inconsequential and like I wanted to be quiet.

But I forgot. I do this for me. And I am scared right now. This is me sorting through my thoughts and fears.

I have already messaged my plastic surgeon, done as much research I can on the brand and serial number of my implants, they have been recalled and they are Allergan. Not the Biocell textured ones that cause cancer, but still same manufacturer and still recalled.

I have a requisition for bloodwork to see if its something else.

But I won’t have any answers today, and today I am afraid.

I just wrote a really long email to someone about forgiveness and understanding.

I can literally sit down and figure out why everyone who ever wronged me did what they did.
And, for the most part I have.
I took the time to know them well enough to understand them and the ‘why’.

Granted, until 6 or 7 years ago, and even still sometimes, my first instinct is to wonder what I did wrong. But this has lessened over the years.

I went through a breakup recently. It didn’t stick, but I was pretty amazed at my reaction to it in the moment.

Theoretically and historically, I should have been decimated, devastated, a crying puddle on the ground. And I did cry, and I cocooned a bit. But instead of falling down the self-deprecation rabbithole (that for me has no end) I just decided it was because I hadn’t dyed my hair. Ridiculous, yes, but something that I could easily fix.

Instead I put myself in his shoes and understood as best I could. And dyed my hair.

And I decided to make some changes to my life, for me.

I cannot control other people’s actions, I can only control my reactions to them.

This was a person who I love and care about beyond measure, there is no flip switch that turns that off if he doesn’t do what I want him to do.

Everything is better than fine now because things we couldn’t promise in words have been proven by actions.

I have abandonment issues and this blog is explanation for that in and of itself. A treasure trove of the times I have been left. And that’s okay.

For every one of them that left, they all came back eventually, and I got my answers. But the funny thing is I didn’t need them. And maybe that’s why.

I forgive. It’s what I do.

Sure, I mourn their absence, I obviously wanted them around in the first place or they wouldn’t have been in my life. But everyone has their own path and that’s okay.

Final Boss would have had to rise above the familiarity and comfort of mediocrity to be with me. Babe, I get it, I struggle with this every day, and it’s hard. I am the queen of underachieving and meeting someone who sees your potential and wants to stick around and support it is fucking terrifying and hard.

It would be easy to get mad and say he used me, and he kinda did, but I allowed it. I didn’t do anything for him that I wouldn’t have done for anyone else if they needed it. He paid me back eventually and I hold no grudge, never really did.

All of this is neither here nor there.

Everyone has baggage, myself included. The secret is realizing a lot of things you are carrying never really belonged to you in the first place. It’s a lot of their issues they put on you and you decided to keep.

I posted this to my Facebook page and good God did people get mad at me.

Go ahead, be mad.

Hold grudges, live with your hate, hold it in your fist and see how badly you get burned.
Keep sipping the poison other people handed you when they wronged you and complain when you get sick.

It just seems like a colossal waste of time to allow someone who hurt you to continue to do so by your own choice.

As far as I can tell, I have this moment, this one right here that I am living in, and unless I am in the midst of a trauma, this moment may not be perfect, but I’m here.

If I closed myself off to experiences based on the bad experiences I have had, I would truly never leave the house, have a job, or speak to anyone, ever.

I got assaulted on a Tinder date a few years back. I didn’t delete Tinder or stop dating altogether. I vetted people and places to meet better, I changed how I dressed, I reported him and got on with my life.
Tinder still sucks, but that’s not the point.

I don’t know when I made the decision not to live in my trauma, but I must have.

I think it was when I was raped. He wanted me afraid, he wanted me traumatized, he wanted some semblance of control over my life even if he wasn’t in it. And for a while, I was afraid and traumatized, I still get a small shudder if I see someone of his stature approaching me on the street.

But what he wasn’t expecting is that I spent a lot of time in therapy after, not reliving the experience at all, but trying to figure out the neurological miswirings in my brain and my previous life experience that facilitated me letting someone like him into my life. I realized I had very low self esteem and was in a place of self-loathing about my job and my lifestyle.

So I fixed those things, I changed my thinking patterns and stopped self-medicating.

I came out of that experience better.

I decided I really liked my job and there was really nothing wrong with it other than society’s antiquated beliefs about female empowerment, sexuality and nudity.

Then I married Captain Save-A-Hoe and backslid like a motherfucker, and subsequently ended that 7 year mess by self-medicating again. But I started recognizing my patterns and eventually broke them.

There is that old adage about ‘living well is the best revenge’.

Revenge doesn’t factor into it for me, I just want to be happy, and holding grudges, reliving trauma or judging others isn’t conducive to happiness, nor is wallowing in my old mistakes.

Against all odds, I am alive and mostly well. This world, and some of the people in it have tried pretty hard to ruin my life, I have done a pretty bang up job of doing that for myself too. And I forgive myself. I forgive them too.

Everything I have ever done (or has been done to me) has brought me to this moment. Yes, I need a shower, and I have a couple stubborn pimples on my chin, my bed needs making, and I really ought to check on my kidlet, but I am here.

And in this moment, I am happy.