Wanting to Belong

I wasn't able to articulate part of what was going through my heart last night, part of why not having measurable breasts punched one of my [many, many] buttons. And that was/is a need to feel a part of, a need to feel I belong, a need to feel relevant.

The place my mind/heart went last night was, "If I got augmentation, I could be a part of that conversation and not outside - looking in."  And I've considered augmentationa number of times and have never been able to come to a hard-and-fast thinking about it.  That in itself advocates against the surgery.  But last night, the desire to have breasts of a more appropriate size to my body, the desirability of breasts, period, was fed by that need to be a part of my family and thinking that having to wear forms all the time made me ...  like a second class, shirt-tail relative.

My family reading this, probably, had some degree of visceral reaction to that statement.  And they are right to.  I know in my head, when I sit down and think of it, that I am as loved by my family as I can be.  Sitting in my daughter's car going home last night I was clinging to that knowledge by my fingertips.  Knowing in my heart and mind how much Debra loves me was all that kept me from losing it last night.

I have always needed to be a part of, to belong to/in/with a group.  When I was young, my Dad's job would change locations often, every 6-18 months.  All the friends I had made got ripped out of my life like noxious weeds.  This made me, on the one hand, desperate to make new friends, and on the other, I held back giving my full self because when we would move, I would lose a piece of me.

But more than anything else, the result has been that I have never done "alone" well.

I have been left with a need to be "a part of" that is so strong it drives me to consider breast augmentation for that reason alone.  I have been considering of late that my desire for Gender Confirmation Surgery has an element of being "a part of"  and there is the the lie that I tell myself that without the breasts and without the vagina I am not a "real woman" like all of my friends and family.  The reality is that I am no less a woman, no less "me" with this boy's body than if I had been born with XX chromosomes.  But like most truths, that gets buried in all the noise.  And most of the noise I generate myself.

So I am left with this Marvel-Comic Monster of a need to be a part of the life around me when the thing I truly do need, require for survival, require to thrive, is to love me for me.  Intellectually, I recognize that I am someone really special, but I am an emo kind of girl, always have been.  And emotionally, it's hard to get to that same place that I know how special I am. And how much I love myself for who I am.

In the end, more than anyone else, more than anything else, I need to belong to me.