Is This Actually Me?

I wrote this in the week following my surgery. Life has changed a lot since then and I'm not in pain anymore but sorting through the emotions that have followed has been a challenge. As I become more comfortable with the new realities of my life, re-reading this and seeing the grief 2017 brought has been strangely hopeful because I have come so far in learning about myself. Anyway. Here it is.

Walking past I get a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I have to stop. I look the same. Disheveled hair,
blue-gray eyes, curved cheeks. Yep. Still me. Somehow I expected it to show on my face that I no
longer have a uterus. I guess the only external indications are the steri strips under my t-shirt.
Four gentle Xs reminding me that any kids we have from now on won’t be grown by me. The reality
is dizzying. Or maybe that’s just my pain meds. I don’t know. Four months is a long time to be in
the kind of pain I was in. But it is also a short amount of time if you think about it. I have had a pretty
easy time of it, I guess. No surgical complications, no infections, no issues. But at the same time it
has been the hardest four months of my life. Daily pain, crying that I can’t care for my babies, my
husband, myself. When I see my face in the mirror now it is curious because I don’t feel anything.
Women who’ve had a hysterectomy report feeling relieved or sad or happy or depressed but I don’t
feel anything. Yet. Just more pain. Maybe this is despair but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like emotional
turtle. Like pulling back into a shell. Because if I let in one emotion I will be overwhelmed by all of them.
And my sutures can’t handle uncontrollable sobbing right now. I feel a little afraid that my unemotional
status is revealing something bad about me like I’m secretly crazy. Who doesn’t feel anything after
having her uterus taken out? I don’t know. I just really don’t know.