You look good naked

There was something in the way you said, “you look good naked” that cut through last night.

You have probably said it to me a thousand times before, but for some reason in that moment I was ready to hear it. 

And ready to believe it. 

It’s been almost a year since they cut my boobs off, and I have tried to push away any thoughts about how I feel about my body. 

Because honestly, they don’t feel worth it. 

My body is going to change again anyway. 

So what’s the point of even thinking them. 

Or feeling the feelings that come along with them, 

My therapist would tell me my feelings matter. That I don't have to stay in them forever, but I do have to let them exist for a little while instead of bottling them up. 

Or worse, ignoring them all together. 

But I just don’t want to. 

I don’t want to acknowledge what cancer has taken from me.

I don’t want to acknowledge that I feel a loss over flesh that I hadn’t really thought much about. 

But maybe I thought more about it than I realized. 

The flesh that fed my babies. 

The flesh that made me feel feminine. 

The flesh that filled out a dress or a top just right when I wanted to look cute on a Friday night. 

The flesh that made me frustrated when it flopped out in the middle of a workout because I wore the wrong sports bra for the intensity. 

The flesh that made me feel noticed when I was single. 

The flesh that wasn’t really all that impressive compared to what I have now, but at least it made me feel like I had an identity. 

Now I wonder in the back of my mind if people question my gender 

I wonder if people think, “What are her pronouns?”. 

The irony of the question is not lost on me. 

For the first time in my life, I wonder what people think of my gender. 

It's not that I care what pronouns someone assumes. 

It's that I never thought about my gender until cancer took away one of the things I'd unconsciously used to recognize myself.

And now living in a body that I wasn’t given a choice but to live in. 

And again, I guess none of us really are given a choice. 

We do the best we can with the bodies we are given and we just keep carrying on. 

But that moment of falling asleep in one body and waking up in another has left me questioning myself more than I would like to admit. 

Not my gender.

I am, and always have been who I am. 

But I feel like I have to outwardly express it more consistently these days so that other people don’t question it, because I worry about what other people will think of me if they think that I am transitioning from one gender to another rather than having beaten a cancer that was supposed to koill me.

And that’s not something I ever thought I would have to say out loud. 

And so, I don’t. 

I sit with it in my body, and I try to ignore it. 

And I put on my make up because it helps me recognize myself. 

Because if I don't, the woman looking back at me in the mirror doesn't quite feel like me.

She feels like someone caught between versions of herself.

Someone whose body no longer matches the picture she carried in her head for thirty-seven years.

A body that saved my life.

A body that still doesn't quite feel like home.