**I am delighted to announce that I have had top surgery! Th..

**I am delighted to announce that I have had top surgery! The surgery and initial recovery have gone exceedingly well, and I am SO happy and excited to share this good news!** 🥰🥳💕 For those of you who have followed me on social media, the surgery itself is not a surprise. :) And if you're new - or just missed me talking about it (totally fine - I talk a lot sometimes!) - I hope you find this announcement to be fairly unsurprising. 😊 I decided to keep the surgery and initial recovery hush-hush on social media. I didn't want to feel overwhelmed by attention right after a large medical procedure! Even well-wishes can become stressful for me, so I chose to reduce distraction and focus only on myself. 🐈‍⬛ Happily this has worked out well. I have had no surgical complications, and my healing trajectory is faster than average! 📈 Growing breasts was traumatic for me. It was only relatively recently, when I learned that surgeons had developed gender-affirming techniques for nonbinary patients, that I began to believe that I could align my body with the way I had always felt it should be. (For clarity: **I am not a man**. Gender is complicated. I am somewhere in the nonbinary / genderfluid region of experience. The type of surgery I've had was chosen to reflect my self-image; I still have some breast tissue, I have living nipples instead of a skin graft, and I did not opt for a “masculinized” chest contour.) **When I took these photos, I cried tears of happiness.** I did not fully realize how much pain I carried on my chest, or how a surgery - a big wound - could actually heal me. Since surgery, so many of my dysmorphic feelings for my body have dissipated, and I realized that I had transferred the pain of the "wrong" body into other parts of me. **I am so excited for the next chapter.** As I recover, I can slowly return to the physical activities that I love. I am thrilled to explore new horizons of art, bodybuilding, movement, and love, free of the shackles of a warped self-image. I am excited to know the me that will be here in a year, two years, ten years, twenty. I hope you are too. :)