Full circle

In August, I got the chance to do top surgery aftercare for my dear friend Jonah. (Remember that awesome mixtape?) While we were in Cleveland, Dr. Medalie did a quick check-up on my chest. At the time, I was about three months post-op. He was happy with the overall aesthetic of my chest, but not as much with the “hypertrophic scarring.” Hypertrophic, as best I know, just means red and raised. Nothing is infected, wrong, worrisome, or otherwise bad. It’s just an aesthetics question, and as a plastic surgeon, Dr. Medalie isn’t quite as .

Anyway, he sent me a pack of high quality Novagel silicone gel sheeting. The basic idea is that I cut strips of this silicone sheet to fit my scars, and then lay them over the site. The gel part loosely adheres to my scar sites, and then somehow works against the hypertrophic aspects. I’m unclear as to the actual process, but this is what it looks like.

Talk about cyborgs, right? I just started wearing them today. I guess I put it off because I have a love-hate relationship with the idea of my scars, and couldn’t quite convince myself one way or another as to whether I actually want to reduce the appearance of my scars. Anyway, although it’s only been one day, they’ve certainly begun helping. My scars seem much… calmer. Less raised. Working as planned.

But here’s where things get eerily full circle. The gel is purposely not strong enough to adhere by itself (like a band-aid), or else it would hurt to remove. This means I have to secure it somehow to my chest.

So I’m back to binding, in a way. All this time later, and I’ve come, strangely, full circle.

An ace bandage was the first way I ever tried to bind, way back in senior year of undergrad. I realize that was all of three years ago, but it feels like a lifetime (or more). I’ve literally been reborn again and again in those three years; I’ve given myself over to a new life as a queer (not gay) person, a new life in a different state, a new life as a graduate student, a new life in a different name, and now this year a new life in a different (and still changing) body. Across all these lives and years and experiences, the most stable piece of my life was – ironically – my body. More specifically, it was my struggle with my body.

Binding became my ritual, my daily practice; it was an impermanent body modification to make that person in the mirror a little more intelligible to me. Recognizable. It was a process and a doing, the outcome of which was a physical sensation and a mental appeasing that together bought me a little time and a little comfort. However, the longer I went on binding, the less time it bought me; each day it seemed less comforting than the day before. It wasn’t enough.

Now, this practice seems so, so long ago as to be completely foreign; wearing this bandage again, though, reminds me just how much it remains intimately, hauntingly familiar. This reprise is a little triggering, to say the least. I can sense that nagging dysphoria creeping into my periphery. Making me stare in the mirror just a little longer to pick out the flaws, smooth out and tug on my shirt just a little harder to hide unwanted curves. Cloud my vision just a little more.

But it’s just in the background. I know better now. I remember who I am. So for now at least, it’s mostly only triggering thoughts, rather than fears. Full circle, not full of doubt. Strange how then, when I first put on an ace bandage, the ideas of surgery and a different body seemed so far away as to be completely foreign. And now, after surgery and in that very different body, it’s the bandages and the binding that seem foreign.

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