Chuck Palahniuk

Sorry, mom. Sorry, God.

The fashion photographer inside my head, yells:

The nurse brings me the personal classified ads from a newsletter. Sister Katherine peers down her nose and through the glasses to read: Guys seeking slim, adventurous girls for fun and romance. And, yes, it's true, not one single guy specifically excludes hideous mutilated girls with growing medical bills.

"The nun's arrived with the man ad his I.V. stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who'd be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased prince charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life."

Ancient aboriginal petroglyphs and junk are just whizzing past

Going outside, the world is all color after the white-on-white of the hospital. It's going over the rainbow. I walk up to a supermarket, and shopping feels like a game I haven't played since I was a little girl. Here are all my favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French's Mustard, Rice A Ronni, Top Ramen, everything trying to catch your attention.

A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some people, but if you don't want it, it's the ultimate form of self-mutilation.

Do the things that scare you the most.

"And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap."

And the crowd of shoppers is bailed, leaving just us and the security cameras instead of God watching to catch us when we fuck up.

I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can drive her car with the windows open and not care how the wind makes her hair look, that's the kind of freedom I was after.

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.