Things that are about me (and things that are not)

I have a bonded-by-shared-trauma friend, (who is more than that, but for purposes of this story, let’s reduce them to that.) who is non-binary and is having surgery to confirm this identity visually.

And I have FEELINGS about it.

And I’ve been struggling to decide why I have feelings.

So I’ve spent some time really digging into what’s troubling me about it. It isn’t that my friend is non-binary. That I’ve known for years and never had a problem with. I realize it comes down to my feelings about my own infertility. I feel like my body has betrayed me by not doing the things it was supposed to do re: getting pregnant, staying pregnant, etc. I had to resort to drugs and interventions and I resent it.

And yet I still like my body. I still am essentially happy being female. My friend had two kids and still doesn’t appreciate what their body did for them. But that’s MY perspective. That’s all my projection. I feel like my friend owes their body support because it did what my body failed to do.

But that discounts all the times their body did not do the right thing. And all the times my friend put up with a body that didn’t look, feel, smell right. And more to point, people are entitled to feel different ways about things.

My “if your body did the right thing, you owe it,” mentality comes from the feeling that I have that my body let me down. And if I’m willing to let my failed body off the hook, then what right has anyone to change anything? Which is possibly the absolutely worst argument for anything that anyone has ever articulated.

I do not wish to alter my body and that’s okay. But at some point I have got to let go of all this resentment I have towards it.

It reminds me of this story about the man who ate bread and water. If I feed myself on a steady diet of resentment, then I will think that no one deserves grace. That’s my thing to work on today, apparently.