I Had to Learn Confidence Again

The surgery changed my body in a way that I had agreed to but had not fully understood until it was real. I had been told what would happen. I had signed the forms. But there is a distance between understanding something intellectually and living in it.I had the stroke at forty-one. I was in a meeting. That detail has always felt absurd to me, that something so significant happened in such an ordinary context. One moment I was in a meeting. The next I was not.

The first time I went back to work after treatment, I wore three different outfits before I left the house.

None of them felt like me. I went in wearing the one that felt least wrong and spent the morning with a low-level awareness of my own body that I had never had before.

I want to be careful about how I say this next part. I am not telling this story to be dark about the experience. I made the medical decisions I made for good reasons and I would make them again. But I think it is important to say that body confidence after significant medical intervention is a real thing that takes real time and that nobody should be made to feel they are taking too long with it.

What helped me was small and practical. A woman I knew who had been through something similar and who talked about it without drama, just honestly. A style of dressing I slowly worked out that felt like mine again, not the same as before, but mine. Time. A lot of time.

I am back at work full time now. I have mostly stopped thinking about my body as a separate thing I am managing. There are days where the awareness surfaces and I have to sit with it for a moment before it passes. That is still happening. But it is not the main thing anymore.

The main thing is that I am here. Still building. Still figuring it out. And that the version of confidence I have now is different from before. It has been tested. I think that is something.