Fruits

Pulled from the pages of my written journal. Pardon the length of this entry - it was a long flight.

I'm on yet another flight - San Francisco to Chicago, then on to New England. It’s an emergency run to a vendor that continues to cause problems. Luckily for me, though, an online friend or two live fairly near to the area I am visiting. Reise lives just outside the airport I’m flying into, and Elisa, who I met in Chicago and again at Meltzer’s, lives about an hour away.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to get some thoughts down concerning SRS and life. When I visited with my therapist recently, I told her my biggest hang-up with SRS deals with attraction. I think I’m still attracted to women, but yet, I know that I’m also attracted to men - but it’s in an entirely different way. I’m attracted to the beauty of women - their curves, hair, hairless skin, warmth, and their softness. There is also a societal connection of some sort - something, possibly just friendship. In men, I’m attracted to their strength, muscle, firmness, roughness, a clean look - yet unkempt to some sort. The attraction to them is also a completeness - key to lock, pen to paper, peanut butter to jelly - one doesn’t exist well without the other.

So, my biggest hang up comes down to the attraction to women. If I end up with a woman, it would be nice to have penetrative sex - sex in which both were able to experience it at the same time. But yet, the times I did have sex with a woman, I dunno, it just didn’t quite seem right. Yeah, it felt nice, but it didn’t quite feel right. Sometimes I wonder if any lesbians wish they had a penis just to have simultaneous sex with their partner. I bet there are a few (who aren’t FTM’s). Anyway, that’s my hurdle. If I end up with a guy, SRS is no big problem, and really, lesbian sex, from what I hear, is still quite fun - even without a penis. And come on, sex is such a minuscule part of our lives, yet many of us think about it all of the time. Why create so much pain over the remaining dysphoria when I can have SRS and worry about the sex part of it later?

Another little fear about SRS for me is getting past the feeling of no longer being “special.” I’ll just be another girl - one that....cannot have children; has larger hands and feet; has larger shoulders, smaller hips, and a larger waist; and will be creeping up on 35 by the time she’s healed.

Believe it or not, I have a small garden - very small. Actually, it’s more of a remnant of a garden. A bell pepper plant survived from last year. A while back, I saw a huge green pepper on the lower section of the plant. The hard part about the pepper plants that I’d planted is that I had green, yellow, and red - so it’s hard to know if it’s a regular green pepper or one that hasn’t ripened from green to yellow or red. When a slight red tint appeared, I knew I still had a little time before I should pick it. Gradually, though, it ripened into this really nice red pepper. Here was this half dead pepper plant trying to survive, and yet, there on its lower branch was this remarkable, pristine red pepper. The thing is, I almost didn’t want to pick it because it was so beautiful. It made the plant special, and if I took its sole pepper, well, then, the plant would no longer be special. It would just be a plant without any fruit. But then I thought, “It’s still special to me” and “It’s not the fruit that makes it special, it’s the amazing ability for it to survive that does.” It will still be an amazing pepper plant to me. With that, I reached down to the pepper, grabbed it firmly, and ripped it away from the plant.