on hiatus, change, and grief again

i'm alive and i have made it to the end of july. i'm about eight weeks post-op from top surgery. my girlfriend and i recently celebrated four years together. my band is recording our first album. lots of things to wait for and lots of things to look forward to.

for how long i've been away, i'm kind of surprised that i don't have much else to report. of course, the surgery was the biggest thing that was happening to me for a while. all things considered, it went well—it's still a bit early to say, but there haven't been any complications and my incisions seem to be healing quickly. i didn't feel any significant pain or nausea coming out of the operating room, which i consider myself lucky for. i actually have a full bottle of opioids that i'm still trying to get rid of. the discomfort i did feel was psychological.

i knew it would happen because of all the research i did, but post-surgical depression still hit me like freight trucks two weeks after the operation. it's one thing to know that the body processes surgery as trauma—it's another to be the mind inhabiting the body that endures it. i have never felt such a remarkable disconnect between my physical self and my very being. i could've been on severance.

for roughly one week, i was consumed by overwhelming amounts of grief—the kind felt when a distant relative passes away and felt only when you are reminded of their absence. it was like a part of me had died. like a part of me had killed someone. i regret not giving my body more closure before making it part with something it created; all it knew was that it woke up with something violently missing, and i think the shock was just too much.

it was kind of funny—i actually didn't know when the surgery took place. i was sitting in a chair when the nurse gave me valium, and before i got a chance to realize i was about to be put under anesthesia, i confidently told my girlfriend "valium isn't a sedative" and knocked out five minutes later. i woke up in the same chair asking when the surgery was going to happen until i looked down and realized it had already happened two hours ago.

i feel fine now, after taking a good amount of time to recover from everything. i've been cleared to resume normal activities since june, but i feel like i'm still in the process of getting back into things. the day after i returned to work, my company announced another wave of layoffs—the third one in the one and a half years since i've been here. my team got gutted, with only four of us left; i was spared, to my dismay. they don't pay me enough to hope i get to be next when i'm off the clock, so i've been doing everything i can to take my mind off work. i've mostly been playing embarrassing amounts of pokemon until the sun goes down.

gathering the motivation to work on this blog was admittedly difficult, especially since some of my layouts were left miserably neglected when i began my hiatus. i've been deadlocking myself trying to find the most optimal way to organize my code to the point where i end up coding nothing at all. the fact that you're reading this is evidence that i eventually prevailed.

but i'm glad to be back. i don't regret anything now, and i don't feel like i'm waiting with baited breath as much. i'm temporarily seeing a different therapist for a few months to help me address some symptoms of trauma i developed from past interpersonal violence, and i'm hoping for the best. i think that's the most i can do in times like these.