Kintsugi: boob eulogy two
It might seem as though I have skipped the entirety of what it was to live with chemically produced for profit boobs, so I will say this; it was mostly nondescript, nothing there and nothing special about having plastic in my breasts. The palpable energy is felt mostly in the death and birth of it. That’s the human experience.
I’ve been recently and reasonably obsessed with the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Artistry created through the volatile creation of sharp edges, through breaking to be closed in by rivers of gold. Reads a little like masculinity and feminine coming into balance to me.
I like the idea of seeing this explant project as a breaking the vessel that is my human suit akin to Kintsugi. Creating and even inviting sharp edges, knowing gold is gathered to enhance the probability of artistic magic. Maybe just a ploy to weave peace into having implanted foreign toxic chemicals, and needing to remove them, maybe something more. A tangible way to improve the value of brokenness.
I’ve done this before, alchemized sharp edges and learned how to turn towards painful markers in time and experience, approaching a wound like the love it can be, the love it is. It’s how I live, track record based. I know when it comes to habitual humanity, how we do anything is how we do everything. I am here for it.
There was belief that this feeling of value, artistry, peace with the result could be the outcome. And, also there was a healthy dose of fear and skepticism, without there would have not been the sensation of having achieved something remarkable, the astonishment of alchemy.
Reverse modification has shown me the self, sharp edges and gold. Keen connection and awareness of what is, certainly both new and old, parallels and transcends time. Exactly why I came into this plastic curriculum, to find the possibility of repairing toxicity, through even fallibility itself.
Some rad humans have been mates in this creation, I am surrounded by reflections of myself and reminders of love and been brought to the womb of conscious creation through this experience.
The inner team feels intimate, like family.
Magnetized from a source that I think (and hope) can feel the speciality of the experience of me. The human pleasure of creating how, and with whom I want to be, those I am destined through choice to be creating remarkableness with.
Even the outer circle of music, conversations, artistry influencing the season feels like this, like love and remarkableness.
The constant flow of love that has been the experience of the last 3 weeks is hard to articulate because there is so much of it. I desire to notably mention a few, unknown for my brevity, I am trying to limit my long windedness.
The surgeon has arguably surpassed my previous favorites, acquired by overwhelming surgical experience. (shout out to the fetal surgery team at UCSF and some but not all of the pediatrics at pcmc.) Mostly because he continues to reflect similar thinking, platonic resonance of home, of self, of the way I see things.
The importance of selecting an explant surgeon revealed itself quickly and the research skills that drive many of my decisions confidently served me well in the discovery. His specialty is not boobs, but rather craniofacial medically necessary plastic surgery.
The probability of his essence being delicate, meticulous, medical and ethical seemed high enough to wager a drive down the mountain for consult. He does boobs of course, I didn’t convince a doc to do something to me he knew nothing about, neither of us lack that kind of intelligence, but the point is, not his specialty, not what nourishes him and I liked it that way.
In short, his contribution to the body modification industry didn’t totally repulse me.
I didn’t find him on in the FB explant and breast implant illness groups, or in the top 10 well marketed explant surgeons in Utah. I can’t even remember how his name presented itself to me but I do remember kind of knowing when I jotted it down on the mini yellow dollar store notepads I favor, that he was it.
In that initial apt we talked about spelunking, of all things. At one point we were two younger humans traversing the darkness of the same caves in the same area. Rare then and maybe even more rare to come to that so quickly as strangers in an office.
There was a stock jellyfish canvas on the wall of his exam/consult room, which I realize can sound superstitious, audacious, and ridiculous, but this is how I have come to find the law of attraction works. Through the meaning of the individual soul giving it. The inhale and exhale of an animal I’ve found ceremonious and sacred embodiment in.
This week at my 3 week post op we discussed professional football, (not an uncommon topic in my life). I shared my unpopular opinion (Americans vote with their time and money, I know where I stand) and a connective comparison between the NFL and body modification in one sentence, and his response was exactly what I previously described, home. A reflection and resonance, agreement and perspective that consciously contributes to the uncomfortable conversation on the table in both pro sports and breast implants.
Lack of popularity doesn’t always mean loneliness.
Wondering what I said?
“Pro ball is the objectification of the masculine body for entertainment and profit in the same way that body modification of the feminine is for sexual entertainment and profit.”
It’s all gross.
Here is the thing, it never made sense to me to go to a surgeon contributing heavily to the dangerous practice of medically unnecessary plastic surgery. To go to the guy putting silicone in children and completely uninformed women. So I didn’t, I diverted as I always have from the mainstream for the edge of the run, near the trees. Knowing that in that, I would have all that I need.
Also called in; an anesthesiologist that within minutes of meeting me relaxed her professional boundary and had a candid psilocybin conversation with me, drawing the medicine that lives in my body up into the chemistry of this journey. A nurse whose commentary said what everyone thinks, the result is pretty cute, something I can gratefully now embody with ease. A surgical center that also employs an art curator, the walls were even a reflection of my values. I even persuaded this surgical team into listening to dark ethereal classical, though I don’t actually know how long they kept it going once I bounced off into ketamine supported excavation.
It was all love.
Being held in my journey back home to MY body just the way that I would find ideal, the ceremony I had dared dreamed it could be.
Two other elements worthy of mention in this explant journey come from the clearing of old patterns between the masculine and feminine that could only be resolved through opportunistic perpetuation. It’s both fortunate and un, simultaneously. Duality, this constant human companion of mine. (and yours by the way, this planet runs that way).
Nate found himself during surgery triggered into the wounds of potentially losing me, trauma that occurred with an alarming frequency in the first decade of our relationship. He took me home in that energetic state, which resulted in fear based nonsensical behavior. (The way triggers work for most if not all of us.) I of course gave meaning to his behavior, akin to my own historical wounding. Something along the lines of "I don't deserve to be taken care of or to be unwell in a physical way". This resulted in the creation of my own isolation in the early stages of integrating the excavation ceremony and healing my body. Familiar and comfortable isolated suffering.
The resolve came through the perpetuation, not in spite of it. We shifted the historical ways of being in relationship to the threatening experience of physical fragility between two lovers and found our way to more expressed awareness than had been exchanged previously around this subject matter, we've come a long way in 24 years but this felt like a leap.
A week after explant, lover and all of our boys went overnight to a wrestling tournament which presented me with a vacancy in my healing schedule that I felt inclined to fill with women, with sisters, to hold space for a celebratory funeral of this woman who held silicone and saline in her chest to feel good about herself.
I commissioned my daughter to free hand an ouroboros on the box option I had settled on. I also invited her into the little coven I had gathered, an initiation. I asked the other humans to bring flowers, nourishment, and anything else they felt called to, which included books, bras, and written prayers. They obliged a listen to a rough (not even recognizable) draft of this and we sat in what felt like endless hours of musing on the things we don’t get to talk about in other spaces. Our bodies, our boobs, our lived stories that connect us back to our one-ness and the potent medicine of intuition and creation.
Ongoing ceremony.
Today I’m still in the pain as it were, sometimes the sensation of a million needles puncturing the skin of a waking up limb, but instead my breasts. Or the bizarre sensation that happens in the entirety of the body when a fork scraps teeth, or nails on a chalkboard. It’s weird.
At moments I’m weary of caretaking my body, impatient really, vacillating between wombing in my bed for the whole of the day, and trying to be alive and active and maybe even a little distracted.
It’s a weird space to occupy, the in-between, the space that only a few weeks ago I spoke of my affinity for. I love it tenderly, and yet resist it too. I know the work is to relax and trust the timing, the process, the experience, the transition, to trust the awakening of nerve endings.
I’ve been gratefully sitting inside privilege this week, of having had this experience the way that I have with the humans creating art with me, contributing to the outcome. Even acquisition of financial resources and the time to heal and recover have shown me how held and supported I am.
And also, I’d like to thank me.
My radical and unconventional ways produce something that feels so profoundly like aliveness and love, I might as well be Will Ferrel in ELF, interested only in proclaiming it to the world with little care for how ridiculous it might look.
Held, seen, and shown.
Love in the heart space,
in the boobs that are new.
Love,
Audrey