I didn't think I would enjoy so much the little things of daily existence. It's so great to be able to look in the mirror and not disagree with the image reflecting there, looking down at one's body and feeling in harmony with it. It's a feeling of peace as if everything is just right. Being content and enjoying who you are is amazing.
There's a special, unusual bond that you feel between you and the people who help create who you want to become. It is a connection deeper than superficial interactions. The surgeons have the power over the physical, material body. However, I wanted them to see me more than a project that needs to be built, repaired, reconfigured, revised and guided into existence. I wanted them to see who I am beyond the physical presence. I wanted them to believe in who I was, who I could be, who I was meant to become - and they must have believed, because they agreed to see me for who I wanted to be.
I want to show them that I can fly: for them to see me in the context of achievement, daring to go beyond limits, rising higher and bolder on that upwards direction, the arrow that goes further and advances one more step on the evolutionary path for the human race. I want them to see me as an achiever, not just a person that needed to lay down and heal and rediscover the truth about life. I hope I will make a better impression than the immediate weakness, confusion and uncertainty that followed the surgery. I want them to see the daring sky in my eyes, the flight in my standing up, the achievement in my healing and the infinite power of my dreams. I became real and had to learn to be alive again, but I want them to see not only the process, but the result and the ideal too. I want to be more than just another Pinocchio in the row of patients they must have had before me. I want them to be proud of me, to see new meaning in the result of their work, as more than just cells and tissues. Maybe they also had an ideal about me, that they saw accomplished when I got up and my body functioned properly. And yet I want them to believe that now I can fly.
I realize we have this in common: daring to go beyond the limits of reality and making it unlimited, because I had the courage to go through with it, to be born again, and they had the courage to perform it and make sure it went well. That is the reason why we met: we are on the same team as far as human evolution is concerned. But unlike me, they probably feel a huge power and responsibility, handling people's lives day by day.
I just want them to see that I can be a lot more, that I was meant to become better. I am grateful to them in a way that is hard to express, it's as if we share something that only the brave, the daring and the progress makers can experience.
I consider myself more than a patient, a new born child, a frame with blank content or a design to be determined into shape. I didn't want to be seen as something undefined. I want to inspire them, just as I hope to inspire people who read this, by sharing my experience. I had the courage to experiment with transformation because I didn't want anyone to see me as undefined anymore, even if that's also a way to be seen in this universe.
I've been undefined for many years. I've been undefined for so long, I was tired of feeling invisible.
I felt a sense of false existence and it bothered me more than I could accept. I wanted to be true to myself. I wanted to be authentic, to be genuinely representing myself on the outside in the right way. Being incongruent with myself was unbearable, exhausting and long term depressing. It was a fake life that I wanted to change into truthfulness, into a correct redesign of existence.
If you don't know what it's like to be in the “undefined zone”, you don't know how annoying it can get day by day: you're neither this nor that, you know you are in a way but people see you in another way and it never ends... It's a permanent struggle and clash of perspectives. One gets tired of it so much that it doesn't even make sense anymore.
I guess after so many years of being undefined I learned to understand that things are hardly ever finally and forever defined in this world: everything is in permanent motion, everything changes from one day to another, from one minute to another. But the notion of flexible existence doesn't take away from the burden of what it means to be undefined in the world and in conflict of identity. Having the right to be who you are is a basic need. It is the first and most important right: the right to life. Identity. Existence within the truth.
It may be hard to understand, but it's just a matter of correspondence of the external reality with the inside truth. You've got the “inner” you, your undeniable truth and you've got the “external” you which is how you appear to the world – and that is something you can’t entirely and magically transform overnight. It can be done, but you can only change it in time. You’ve got to have patience about it. Improving means transforming. It’s not a word to be avoided. Life itself means transformation from one definition to another, which implies everything is in between phases of evolution and everything is more or less undefined, at any time. This whole universe is a work in progress. The galaxy is moving. Planets are spinning. The sun is rising. Billions of life forms are searching for their truth. And you expect to be clearly defined when nothing is ever at the end of its progress? The reality is that both your inner self and your external self are undefined. Your inner self is undefined because it is a spark of life beyond definition and your external self - your physical appearance - is still ambiguous and it keeps changing anyhow... and everyone sees only what they can understand.
In time, I learned to see the advantage in each situation, no matter how difficult. For example, what do you get from being undefined to the world? You are, of course, in an uncomfortable zone where you have to prove your existence to the others. But it gives you a perspective that others do not have. You can understand things beyond the frames of established definitions. Your mind is not tricked by what the eyes may discover. You don’t have the option of being superficial or square headed. You are aware that life is very complex and you don’t fall in the trap of judging or having prejudice of any type.
Taking the leap from the undefined existence to making it more defined in the way that you want is never an easy or rapid event. It takes time. “Rome wasn't built in a day”, neither is anything that is intended to have stability and quality. It doesn't happen in the blink of an eye. However, we are often impatient and we want to see dreams come true overnight. It's not one day or one night though: sometimes it takes an eternity to redefine who you are. I was lucky to see it happen sooner than an eternity though...
I guess the main issue was not that I was undefined: it was that I was wrongly defined. I knew for sure who I wasn't, and I didn't want to go on being incorrectly defined or wrongly perceived. I needed to agree with myself and make myself real in the world. I needed to redefine myself, to be true.
Being born again is about having a new shape, seeing life differently, but also feeling and thinking of things in a new way. And this is the hardest part: you must learn everything again.
You must discover and understand the truth about yourself, who you are and what you can do in the world.
Waking up from anesthesia was like starting from zero: learning to walk, to think, to feel... I had to remember who I was. It took me a long time to recall that I was a free spirit, that I was an achiever, a daring arrow, that I had been actually born to fly. It took me many months of learning to deal with the physical realities, meanwhile I somehow overlooked the inner construction. I initially held on to the first feeling that happened to me when I was born again: a love so intense like the beginning of the world. It took me a long time to realize I had to learn who I was again. I had to remember. I had to dream it, to project it, to see it happen, to believe in it. Focusing on the physical healing was not enough: I had to understand who I was in my mind, who I wanted to be, more than a redefinition of physical or psychological existence. I had to seek that motivation that I had forgotten in the months of focusing on the immediate reality. I had to remember there was a higher me that needed to fly. Above that, the most important thing was to think about who I was and who I wanted to become. Because redefining myself meant I had to decide again and again who I could be.
And I knew I wanted to be the one who could fly.