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I’m a nineteen-year-old gay college freshman. That’s a good enough introduction, right?
In the past, I visited the old forum from time to time, so I know good and well how incongruous, compulsive, despair-filled rants like this are a dime a dozen around here (or around there). But be that as it may, I’ve exhausted most other known feasible outlets for expressing my feelings over circumcision, so I thought it was as good a time as any to try to do so here.
It’s been roughly a year and a half since I first started to actually comprehend what circumcision is, and what it meant for a circumcised male like myself. In that time, I’ve been on a veritable rollercoaster of difficult feelings and personal challenges, which has indeed enlightened me to some aspects of myself that I hadn’t known, but if my being here is any indication, it hasn’t gone too well overall. Looking within myself to find enough self-worth to pull myself out of the circumcision-induced funk has proven fruitless, imploring my mother for answers and hopefully closure about having the procedure done to me has routinely been met with a lack of sympathy or general understanding (and sometimes plain obliviousness or refusal to discuss), and doing the same with my father, while yielding more sympathy than with my mother, has ultimately only led to the insistence that I try to find “the real cause” of my turmoil, as if having a part of myself forcibly removed as an infant isn’t a legitimate enough reason to feel bad. (I should note that my parents were never married and my mother had sole custody of me, though I have easy access to them both at this point. I should also note that while I have three half-brothers who are all circumcised as well, my father was left intact due to his parents waiting too long.) I’ve been using canisters to go through the restoration process for about 5 months now, though the process is proving to be slower than what I’ve heard canisters are supposed to require. Generally, no matter what I might do, I can’t seem to keep myself from coming back to the subject of what my penis is missing, which is why I’ve written here in hopes of getting some helpful concessions.
Please forgive me for sounding like a pessimist, but I want to be blunt. I know what restoration can do for me, but I also know what it can’t do. I run myself ragged reading articles and journals and testimonies and reports, over and over, chasing some false hope for a piece of good news that will mitigate the genital-centric crisis I’m stuck with, and ultimately feeling the void inside me grow a little bit more pronounced each time I have to mentally run my finger over words or phrases like “permanent” and “facsimile” and “cannot be recovered”. It might be obsessive to worry endlessly about “never knowing what I would’ve been like at 100%”, since you could argue that no one’s really at “100%”, but the displeasure persists nonetheless. I find myself internally referring to my body as incomplete and defective, to the point that I occasionally feel some kind of dysphoria between myself as a person and my physical self. Kind words and messages of body positivity from others, even those who are particularly knowledgeable of circumcision and/or particularly well-meaning, are often lost on me, because I’m the kind of person who prefers to look at such situation holistically, rather than just focusing on the aspects that make me “feel better”. I can’t help but attribute deliberately ignoring the unchangeable effects of circumcision as a passive form of denial, and I will not lie to myself just to uphold a shallow sense of contentment. After all, it’s that kind of mentality that keeps parents cutting up their kids in the first place, right?
Even so, thinking of something like circumcision objectively, and then trying to find an objective solution to it like I have, can lead one’s mind to some pretty dark places. Suffice to say, there have been times when it’s become cripplingly depressing, and if you’re also a cynic with low self-esteem like me, who often has trouble buying into a lot of “look on the bright side, love thyself” type ideas, it can be ridiculously hard to deal with. It would be a lie to say that I’ve never thought of doing… drastic things to myself as a result of trying to rationalize what was done to me, and even as I’ve come to know the occasional bout of acceptance and emotional stability in regards to my circumcision, it always inevitably devolves back into an eating negativity that taints most every facet of my day-to-day life whenever it’s around. A few weeks ago, at the suggestion of my father, I started seeing a therapist employed by my school (again, to find out the “real” cause of my unhappiness), though given that he’s also male and therefore possibly circumcised himself, the thought of being rejected through an insistent lecture on superficial health benefits has prevented me from even mentioning my circumcision-related feelings thus far. I’ve heard the horror stories about others who went through similar ordeals trying to find help with their circumcisions in therapy, so I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to open up about it, at least in these specific circumstances.
I will say that constantly being hounded by circumcision grief has in itself allowed me to gain a better understanding of exactly why it is that I feel so distressed about it, aside from the obvious reasons. The major crux of the dilemma which I’ve come to understand as of yet has to do with two concepts which I feel circumcision has now largely deprived me of: significance and beauty. As I said before, I’ve heard no small amount of positive messages talking about the importance of “being proud” of my body for what it is, and recognizing my own worth outside of just being a person who has a penis that just happens to have been mutilated. I don’t hate those ideas, and in fact hearing them has actually led me to a better understanding of how I’m an actual person rather than just a scarred penis with a person-shaped blob attached to it. But, I can’t keep myself from criticizing that kind of reinforcement in my mind due to what I feel is the more deep-seeded pain that circumcision has inflicted on me, not just physically but emotionally. It’s difficult to feel significant or beautiful in any real capacity when my own mother, a woman who prides herself on having been a capable stone wall of a single parent, would be so thoughtless to have me strapped to a table and cut up for “cultural standards”, and furthermore that someone I’d thought loved me unconditionally as her “perfect” little boy would so leniently agree to a permanent cosmetic operation like that. As “perfect” as she thought I was, apparently I wasn’t born “perfect” enough that I didn’t need to be put under the knife. In other words, it feels as if this is all some kind of punishment for the simple occurrence of being born male, and it functions like a brand of sorts that marks me as something less important in the eyes of not just my own parents, but society as a whole. Having been thoroughly planted in the dregs of the single life for most of my existence, there’s never really been anyone in my life whom I’d thought had had quite as much love for me as my parents, and given what I now know about why I was circumcised, in tandem with their general apathy towards my plight as well as other unrelated stigmas between us, I feel like I’ve lost a lot of the faith I had in even their love for me. And without them, whose love do I have to keep me going?
Given the prevailing lack of self-worth that circumcision grief and a culmination of other issues instill within me, I almost certainly don’t have my own love to live off of. Future romantic pursuits might be promising for filling that void, but they also come with the gnawing fear of what will happen if I end up with an intact guy who fills me with an envy I should never feel towards a loved one. I would never criticize another guy for something like that, nor would I criticize another guy for being circumcised, but if the potential consequence is either having to acknowledge an inherent difference between him and myself because of something he has that I don’t, or driving someone else to misery because of my own sadness, even the apparently blissful act of being in a relationship feels skewed by circumcision’s effects on me. In addition, as I’ve only truly been exploring my sexuality for a few years now, becoming aware of an entire world of sexual themes as a young adult, while also learning that a decision I didn’t get to make has left me with an impediment that will likely worsen whatever sexual experiences I have, is fairly disheartening in itself, even though I won’t define my value in a relationship solely by how good I might be in bed. At this point, my only real hope is that I can one day find someone who’s understanding and loving enough that they truly convince me that I’m fine the way I am, but a hope like that sounds lofty, and even then there’s no telling how much time it will take to find such a person.
I just hope I can fill the wait with enough things that I’m still around and available if and when the opportunity comes. But before I commit to that the portion of my happiness that stems from my bodily securities, I wanted to try my hardest to see if there was some idea, some fact that I was missing which might make all of this even a little bit easier to cope with. Not even specifically related to romance or family, but just anything at all.
In the past, I visited the old forum from time to time, so I know good and well how incongruous, compulsive, despair-filled rants like this are a dime a dozen around here (or around there). But be that as it may, I’ve exhausted most other known feasible outlets for expressing my feelings over circumcision, so I thought it was as good a time as any to try to do so here.
It’s been roughly a year and a half since I first started to actually comprehend what circumcision is, and what it meant for a circumcised male like myself. In that time, I’ve been on a veritable rollercoaster of difficult feelings and personal challenges, which has indeed enlightened me to some aspects of myself that I hadn’t known, but if my being here is any indication, it hasn’t gone too well overall. Looking within myself to find enough self-worth to pull myself out of the circumcision-induced funk has proven fruitless, imploring my mother for answers and hopefully closure about having the procedure done to me has routinely been met with a lack of sympathy or general understanding (and sometimes plain obliviousness or refusal to discuss), and doing the same with my father, while yielding more sympathy than with my mother, has ultimately only led to the insistence that I try to find “the real cause” of my turmoil, as if having a part of myself forcibly removed as an infant isn’t a legitimate enough reason to feel bad. (I should note that my parents were never married and my mother had sole custody of me, though I have easy access to them both at this point. I should also note that while I have three half-brothers who are all circumcised as well, my father was left intact due to his parents waiting too long.) I’ve been using canisters to go through the restoration process for about 5 months now, though the process is proving to be slower than what I’ve heard canisters are supposed to require. Generally, no matter what I might do, I can’t seem to keep myself from coming back to the subject of what my penis is missing, which is why I’ve written here in hopes of getting some helpful concessions.
Please forgive me for sounding like a pessimist, but I want to be blunt. I know what restoration can do for me, but I also know what it can’t do. I run myself ragged reading articles and journals and testimonies and reports, over and over, chasing some false hope for a piece of good news that will mitigate the genital-centric crisis I’m stuck with, and ultimately feeling the void inside me grow a little bit more pronounced each time I have to mentally run my finger over words or phrases like “permanent” and “facsimile” and “cannot be recovered”. It might be obsessive to worry endlessly about “never knowing what I would’ve been like at 100%”, since you could argue that no one’s really at “100%”, but the displeasure persists nonetheless. I find myself internally referring to my body as incomplete and defective, to the point that I occasionally feel some kind of dysphoria between myself as a person and my physical self. Kind words and messages of body positivity from others, even those who are particularly knowledgeable of circumcision and/or particularly well-meaning, are often lost on me, because I’m the kind of person who prefers to look at such situation holistically, rather than just focusing on the aspects that make me “feel better”. I can’t help but attribute deliberately ignoring the unchangeable effects of circumcision as a passive form of denial, and I will not lie to myself just to uphold a shallow sense of contentment. After all, it’s that kind of mentality that keeps parents cutting up their kids in the first place, right?
Even so, thinking of something like circumcision objectively, and then trying to find an objective solution to it like I have, can lead one’s mind to some pretty dark places. Suffice to say, there have been times when it’s become cripplingly depressing, and if you’re also a cynic with low self-esteem like me, who often has trouble buying into a lot of “look on the bright side, love thyself” type ideas, it can be ridiculously hard to deal with. It would be a lie to say that I’ve never thought of doing… drastic things to myself as a result of trying to rationalize what was done to me, and even as I’ve come to know the occasional bout of acceptance and emotional stability in regards to my circumcision, it always inevitably devolves back into an eating negativity that taints most every facet of my day-to-day life whenever it’s around. A few weeks ago, at the suggestion of my father, I started seeing a therapist employed by my school (again, to find out the “real” cause of my unhappiness), though given that he’s also male and therefore possibly circumcised himself, the thought of being rejected through an insistent lecture on superficial health benefits has prevented me from even mentioning my circumcision-related feelings thus far. I’ve heard the horror stories about others who went through similar ordeals trying to find help with their circumcisions in therapy, so I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to open up about it, at least in these specific circumstances.
I will say that constantly being hounded by circumcision grief has in itself allowed me to gain a better understanding of exactly why it is that I feel so distressed about it, aside from the obvious reasons. The major crux of the dilemma which I’ve come to understand as of yet has to do with two concepts which I feel circumcision has now largely deprived me of: significance and beauty. As I said before, I’ve heard no small amount of positive messages talking about the importance of “being proud” of my body for what it is, and recognizing my own worth outside of just being a person who has a penis that just happens to have been mutilated. I don’t hate those ideas, and in fact hearing them has actually led me to a better understanding of how I’m an actual person rather than just a scarred penis with a person-shaped blob attached to it. But, I can’t keep myself from criticizing that kind of reinforcement in my mind due to what I feel is the more deep-seeded pain that circumcision has inflicted on me, not just physically but emotionally. It’s difficult to feel significant or beautiful in any real capacity when my own mother, a woman who prides herself on having been a capable stone wall of a single parent, would be so thoughtless to have me strapped to a table and cut up for “cultural standards”, and furthermore that someone I’d thought loved me unconditionally as her “perfect” little boy would so leniently agree to a permanent cosmetic operation like that. As “perfect” as she thought I was, apparently I wasn’t born “perfect” enough that I didn’t need to be put under the knife. In other words, it feels as if this is all some kind of punishment for the simple occurrence of being born male, and it functions like a brand of sorts that marks me as something less important in the eyes of not just my own parents, but society as a whole. Having been thoroughly planted in the dregs of the single life for most of my existence, there’s never really been anyone in my life whom I’d thought had had quite as much love for me as my parents, and given what I now know about why I was circumcised, in tandem with their general apathy towards my plight as well as other unrelated stigmas between us, I feel like I’ve lost a lot of the faith I had in even their love for me. And without them, whose love do I have to keep me going?
Given the prevailing lack of self-worth that circumcision grief and a culmination of other issues instill within me, I almost certainly don’t have my own love to live off of. Future romantic pursuits might be promising for filling that void, but they also come with the gnawing fear of what will happen if I end up with an intact guy who fills me with an envy I should never feel towards a loved one. I would never criticize another guy for something like that, nor would I criticize another guy for being circumcised, but if the potential consequence is either having to acknowledge an inherent difference between him and myself because of something he has that I don’t, or driving someone else to misery because of my own sadness, even the apparently blissful act of being in a relationship feels skewed by circumcision’s effects on me. In addition, as I’ve only truly been exploring my sexuality for a few years now, becoming aware of an entire world of sexual themes as a young adult, while also learning that a decision I didn’t get to make has left me with an impediment that will likely worsen whatever sexual experiences I have, is fairly disheartening in itself, even though I won’t define my value in a relationship solely by how good I might be in bed. At this point, my only real hope is that I can one day find someone who’s understanding and loving enough that they truly convince me that I’m fine the way I am, but a hope like that sounds lofty, and even then there’s no telling how much time it will take to find such a person.
I just hope I can fill the wait with enough things that I’m still around and available if and when the opportunity comes. But before I commit to that the portion of my happiness that stems from my bodily securities, I wanted to try my hardest to see if there was some idea, some fact that I was missing which might make all of this even a little bit easier to cope with. Not even specifically related to romance or family, but just anything at all.
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