i’m thinking a lot about identity, the characteristics i’d built mine on and how they’ve all been stripped away. i’m a dancer who can’t dance (because of my ED), a singer who can’t sing (since my thyroidectomy), an attractive young woman who has lost masses of hair and gained to an average weight in recovery and is suddenly no longer young, a ‘smart’ person who today spelled her four-letter last name wrong at the hospital and is generally spaced out and mentally exhausted. i can’t work, i’m not in grad school, i’m pretty isolated from my friends by illness, i can’t serve or volunteer or participate in much direct action. there’s more than this, too but… who am i without these things? i feel dissolute.
if a friend presented me with this question i’d be full of genuine validation about their intrinsic worth and their chance to live in an inside-out kind of way, a way that explores their subjective experience rather than their object-ness or their accomplishments or talents or productivity. but it’s not so easy with myself, and i have all these internalized voices - parents, teachers, bosses, male gazers - to wade through.
