march 12, 2012

today was my three-month checkup post nose surgery - though it's closer to four months now because of a rescheduled appointment.

my breathing has been a lot better since the surgery and, while it's not like it was before the accident, my nose pain is only very occasional now, and i have my sense of smell back (hallelujah!!! that is cause for serious celebration! do you know how weird it is to live with a severely impaired sense of smell? eating is so totally different - disorienting to say the least!)

in short, my nose has officially been mended :)

the doctor asked me how i was healing since the surgery, and i filled him in on the details. i told him there was a lot of scar tissue, though, and i wondered if that was normal? he replied in this really sage, yet off-handed way, "oh, we heal by scarring." we heal by scarring. i know he meant this in a medical sense and probably wasn't aware of any poetical layers in what he said, but it's been cycling through my mind all day.

over and over, this theme of visible history has been coming up for me in doing this project. whether it's about choice of thread colour when mending a sweater, or earrings that don't set perfectly when glued back together, or making peace with my own body's weaknesses and scars and changes. we are marked by our histories, and it doesn't make any sense to try to hide them.

this evening was a perfect dovetail to all my thinking on the topic. i performed in a sex-positive cabaret about consent called "oh ya consensuality!" man, was it ever beautiful. discussions and definitions of what sex positivity looks like, of what consent can be and mean, of its importance in combatting rape culture. i performed an excerpt of falling open (my play about a family's experience of sexual abuse), which felt particularly poignant in the context of that space.

about halfway through the evening, a young guy who was performing for the first time did a rip-roaringly hilarious poem on masturbation and, as he wrapped up, i thought, "what the hell? i might as well go up and do my poem on masturbation, too." i forgot how good this poem felt to say. how good it feels in my body.

it's called homecoming, and i wanted to share it with you here tonight so you can celebrate and remember the reclaiming of body that can happen after sexual trauma. to remember that we scar to heal. that the scar isn't the ending place, it's just the beginning.