Sometimes I think there’s a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that’s where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin…

Jodi Picoult, handle with care

My body is not my own.

I wonder now if it ever was.

In January I will undergo uterus extraction surgery¹. I’m not doing this because I want to, I’m doing this because I have to. It’s surgery or potentially spending the next ten years² constantly menstruating. I’ve been actively bleeding for almost three quarters of this year so far—like, my cycle has almost entirely flipped whereas on average a menstruating woman spends one week of the month bleeding, I’m now spending three—and I can’t take it anymore. I can’t imagine continuing on like this. For my own mental and physical health I cannot continue on like this. Hence, surgery.

I have very mixed feeling about this whole thing. On the one hand, I’m relieved, even happy, that there’s something that can be done about this and that they’re going to do something about this and that I’m not going to have to worry about having my period or getting pregnant ever again. On the other, this is another crack in the shell of certainty I’ve had in my body for my entire life, and I’ve never been opposed to getting pregnant, in fact, it’s only been in recent years that I’ve really been doubting my long-held desire to have a child. And it’s so very final.

There’s a dark, ugly part of me—the part of me that hates myself, I think—that feels as though I am less because of all this. Less desirable, less worthy, less of a woman. And it’s stupid. I know it’s stupid. None of those things are reliant upon what organs I do or do not have. But it feels as though they do. Part of that is, I know, the societal mores in which I’ve lived my whole life as a white woman in the midwestern United States, but another part of that is: I’M LOSING A FUCKING ORGAN! A WHOLE-ASS ORGAN, FROM MY BODY, IS GOING TO BE GONE. And with it goes any chance I had of having a child.

That having a child is the pinnacle of white womanhood is sick and wrong, but losing that chance when you kinda wanted it hurts. Even though I knew it was coming, even requested the surgery, ever since I scheduled it, ever since I have a definitive date for it I’ve been randomly bursting into tears. Sometimes it triggered by seeing or interacting with a child, sure, but sometimes I’ll just be sitting there, thinking of nothing, and I get this shot of panic just surging through me and I can do nothing else but shed some tears. My mind fluctuates between celebration hey, one less thing to worry about with sex! and bereavement who will want me now? and I can’t seem to find my balance. And I can’t stop.

It just goes on and on and on. I jump wildly between what I actually believe, what the white supremist Christo-fascist society in which I was raised tells me I should believe, and my own very complicated feelings. As it boils down, I am losing something both physically and metaphorically. I don’t feel like myself. Half the time I don’t feel like a person. I’m angry and sad and scared and satisfied and happy and frustrated and relieved and it’s all too much. It’s all too much. I can’t even human anymore. I can’t even pretend.

1. Otherwise known as a partial hysterectomy.
2. At LEAST.