Dear Boobs

today is the year anniversary of my mastectomy - i feel mostly fine but when i type that my eyes well up. i'm not sad sad, i'm emotional, and i can't beleive there was a day like that one year ago.
I remember goofing around pre surgery in my gown with my friend Kati. Then when the IV was put in and they started the drugs, i broke down, i finally thought the thought, this is the last day of this life i knew, the boobs i was born with, the boobs that fed my babies, the ones i recognized. I had zero, ZERO idea of what my life would be like a few hours from then.

it was fucking hard the next few weeks recovering, but i also look back at it as one of my favorite times of my life. fuzzy & cozy & so full of love from my peeps. i felt erased somehow, that's not really right, i still felt my old life but i felt a definite division, the past didn't matter and i was a new person, anew. it was oddly freeing. it started a phase that continues where i give less of a shit about the little things. and i know what i can go through, and deal with.

now i'm suprisingly well, i like my new boobs well enough, they certainly look great in clothes, scars ect are on their way to being faded and part of my norm. I still often avoid looking at myself fully, it's like looking past that person in the store you sorta know but dont' want to catch their eye.

 I don't often miss the old me, i decided a long time ago, when i got divorced, that there was no point hanging on to stuff you couldn't change. non attachment. vairagya in Sanskrit, I also draw on the notion of Santosha - contentment, my fav sanskrit word and a guiding principal of yoga philosophy.

Clearly it saved my life to lose them.

I'm having a great year