On a website called TrueYou.com, I read blogs written by women on day one after breast augmentation, day two, day fourteen. “Finally myself,” they said and, “Why did I wait so long?” The comments on their posts were all from other women. “So proud of you,” they said, “so happy for you,” and, “sending so much love your way.” I clicked the profiles of those who commented the most, saw lists of the surgeries each woman had chosen, lived through, the blogs they’d written about how they’d healed and what they wanted next. It was apparently commonplace to undergo multiple cosmetic procedures on the way to wholeness, selfhood. Some women even set out timetables for their entire body transformation, order of procedures, wish lists of surgeons, lines of credit. Were these women addicts? Or were they simply empowered, in touch with their desire, financially and spiritually ready to pursue the body of their dreams, the shape in which they’d finally feel at home? Home might take a lifetime to achieve, but these were women #blessed to have money or good credit, a healthy baseline to begin with, a whole lifetime to give over to achievement.

Achieve, a word used often on TrueYou.com. I’ve achieved the breasts, flat tummy, and butt of my dreams! Now on to the neck and lower face. Maybe also a rhinoplasty, lip implant. With an endoscopic brow lift, might as well get an upper blepharoplasty, too. An upper blepharoplasty was not, as I’d previously thought, a surgery reserved for Asian eyes only. TrueYou.com pointed this out; an upper blepharoplasty was a procedure for hooded eyes, which anyone could have. And yet, most of the TrueYou.com blepharoplasty reviews I scrolled were written by women complaining of their natural Asian eyes, their “natural squinty eyes,” that had made them uncomfortable for far too long. “All my life I’ve been teased about my eyes,” one woman wrote, “and now, finally, I feel awake.”

I toggled between her before and after photos. “Day one and I’m already thrilled with my open, brighter expression,” she wrote, and what sort of woman would I be if I wasn’t thrilled for her?

MORNING OF MY own Day One: I gave Jake my phone to keep safe. I left him in the waiting room. In suite Number 7 I put on a cotton gown, a shower cap, socks. Karen came for me, had me pee in a cup, then walk myself into the operating theater, lie myself down on a metal table. She covered me in a blanket. Dr. Holle appeared. Together, we counted. Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven . . . My last thought before I drifted off was whether I would wake. My last thought was of my mother, how I hadn’t bothered to say goodbye. Then, all thoughts ended and there was only darkness, deep space without time, without pain.