Two nuts exactly. Tomorrow morning is surgery time.

Anxiety at an all time high.

It’s gonna be okay.

(call to action: if you’d like to check in with me, you can sign up for visits or calendar invites to virtual brunches/in-person visits.)

I HAVE A SURGERY TIME. IT IS EARLY MONDAY MORNING.

LIKE REALLY EARLY.

AND I’M NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE ANY TEA OR OTHER SOURCE OF CAFFEINE BECAUSE I HAVE TO START FASTING ON SUNDAY.

(Not that i’m sleeping that much anyway.)

I’ll be at the hospital until Thursday (Sept 1). Starting on Saturday, September 10, we’re going to do visits (masked, N95s provided, please test before coming) as well as virtual brunch and dinners over Zoom/Google Meet throughout week, and hopefully Minecraft on Thursday nights (I haven’t played before, come be bad at games with me!).

The best way to stay up to date is following this blog. Bitsy is collecting info to send calendar invites and set up Signal groups (opsec, yo) for texting/call support, caregiving backups, and...

Less than a week to go.

I am excited.

I am also overwhelmed.

Not with surgery, but by work. For various reasons that were out of my control, I have to wrap several really large projects this week and other than taking a few hours here and there to run to the hospital to do pre-surgery labs, I am not taking time off before surgery to prepare.

Which is exceptionally suboptimal.

The nice thing is that it means that I am too busy to go into anxiety spirals while sitting alone at home. The theme of this whole blog has been about planning and there’s good reason for that: I plan because that is how I deal with anxiety. And in my waking moments, I am happy, I am excited. But as my therapist noted—I plan in my dreams and I plan because it soothes me.

The thing is that I’m not really anxious about surgery or whether I’m making the right decision—not anymore. I’m anxious about who I...

I am realizing that part of my anxiety is that I’ve barely had a chance to think about what happens after recovery. In my fundraising post (which went $1,804 past the goal!), I noted that there was a price to having surgery at the end of August, part of that cost is that the last few months of the fiscal year (fun fact: the fiscal year for the federal government goes from October 1 to September 30) are often the busiest times. And so even as I’ve been reorganizing my home, budgeting and organizing recovery care, and living under a pandemic, I’ve also been working double time trying to make sure I hit some pretty big deadlines before wrapping up next week.

And that means that I’ve barely thought about what happens after I ditch this penis for a vulva and vagina. I’ve been so focused on trying to make sure I have my basic needs—food, medical support, shelter, covered for the three months...

I rarely pulled all nighters in college. I’d stay up late the night before a paper was due and get up early to polish and finish, but I’d usually let myself sleep for a few hours. I’d do that because I’d often dream about the paper and wake up with it fully formed in my head, then sit down at the computer and finish writing it all out.

Now my brain has been doing that with surgery for the last two weeks. Every night I’d dream about another aspect of surgery prep, each night getting a little bit closer to the operating room.

A few nights ago I dreamed about figuring out who would visit me at the hospital. Last night, I dreamed about how how my girlfriend would take me to the hospital and how another friend would wait with me. I dreamed about whether I should pack some congee to eat after I wake from surgery (thank for that idea, Tina) and the logistics of keeping it insulated and warm...

One time when I was six or seven, I asked my parents how to spell a word. Their response was “look it up in the dictionary”. I distinctly remember feeling helpless, my response was “How do I look it up when I don’t know how it is spelled?” The way I knew to navigate a dictionary was using for definitions, not figure out spelling. I didn’t have the right framework to figure it out. Honestly, I’m still pretty terrible at figuring out how to spell things with dictionaries, spelling and editing aren’t my strengths as a content strategist.

That experience and countless others at home, school, and elsewhere taught me two things: first, is that at the end of the day I can only rely on myself (I didn’t say these were good lessons). The second I learned much later: when you can’t figure something out, it’s often because you don’t have the right framework.

Caregiving is hard. Especially if...

(Content warning and top notes: I go into detail about the insurance process as well as a breaking down a few of the steps for vaginoplasty—well more the medical coding rather than the surgery itself, but still.)

You would think that planning for major surgery—especially one that requires three months of downtime—would require a bit of preplanning for things like payment, recovery care.

You’d be right, it does. But the entire system set up to approve, cover, and pay for surgery is not at all conducive to it.

Because that would be smart. It would make sense. Something that is totally against everything the US’s profit-driven medical system is set up for. So if you stumble across this blog because you’re trying to figure out what navigating the whole process is like, this post is for you.

A couple weeks ago, I got a letter from my insurance company saying that surgery hadn’t been...

I won’t be able to leave my apartment during recovery for at least three months. Normally, folks would be able to come and visit, but a lot of y'all live outside of New York City. Or there are multiple raging pandemics and indoor hangs are outside of your risk budget. All of that can be pretty isolating.

So my friend Bill set up a modded Minecraft server for us to play together! If you’re worried about never playing Minecraft before or never installed mods before, that’s okay—I’ve never played before either, so we can totally figure out how to be bad at this game together!

I have another post coming about this, but one thing I love about all y'all is how many different amazing people and communities I’ve become a part of, I’ve always wanted chances to bring people together to bump and do creative shit together, maybe this can be a catalyst. And in good ole’ OpenNews/SRCCON...

Y'all.

Y'ALL.

Six days.

People say we shouldn’t let them steal our joy—the fascists, the white supremacists, the TERFs, the Republicans, and everyone who would rather see a queer polyam trans woman of color gone. Joy is what we live for, people say, joy reminds us of what we are fighting for. A joy shared is doubled and a sorrow shared is halved, people say.

I hope you are feeling the joy that I feel because it only took six fucking days for the fundraiser to reach and pass the $20,000 goal.

And I was not prepared for the outpouring of all the amazing and kind things everyone said about me! I don’t know that I saw everything because I wasn’t even tagged in many of people’s tweets and messages, but I will be remembering them and holding them close to my heart in hard times.

I feel so very loved.

Thank you.

I have three other requests during recovery:

1. Let me know if you’re...

tl;dr: this is a fundraising post—my friend Chris started a GoFundMe to fundraise for my surgery! There are many ways you can help out (more on that at the bottom of the post!) but if you haven’t yet but can give a little money, it would help defray some pretty significant costs.

It feels scary to write this. It feels so scary that even I started thinking about writing this piece months ago, I’ve barely started even though the GoFundMe has already gone up. It’s so scary that even though it’s three-quarters funded even though it’s only been up for two days (cordelia, you can’t hide from the fact that your community loves you).

When I started transitioning, something that I didn’t even know felt wrong suddenly started feeling right. I remember the first time I put on a skirt and the first time I put on a dress. I remember laughing in joy. I remember something just clicking. It felt...