When I’m feeling self-pitying, I sometimes ruminate on the fact that I was born all wrong.
It starts with my gestation. Actually, no. Now that I think about it - it starts at my conception! I was conceived via IVF. Now, I’m not some weird christian saying IVF is a sin, or a sub-par baby, or whatever - in fact a family friend ended up having the world’s first IVF triplets, and they’ve grown up to be a doctor, a scientist, and an artist. I’m saying that for me it was all wrong; forcing a baby into existence even moreso than normal babies are. My conception was tryhard - and hence, I am a tryhard. (See: this entire blog).
Now I suppose we can go on to my gestation. I was a breech baby. My mum likes to say that it’s because I just wanted to be closer to her heart, which is really cute, but my birth caused her a lot of pain, so it might just be the consolation she tells herself. Apparently there’s this Australian legend that breech babies grow up into politicians; I may be even more inclined for the fact that my grandad was a senator, but so far parliament house does not call to me, particularly because it contains my abuser. Anyway, because I was breech, my mother was booked to have a C-section: it wouldn’t have been safe to have me naturally. But before this date my mum went into labour (she had gone swimming at the UNSW pool that morning hahaha); it was late at night; the obstetrician was called to come in to do the C-section but she was in the shower at the time and didn’t pick up the phone. She eventually got out of the shower and realised she’d been paged, and rushed to the delivery room with wet hair, but it was too late, and my mum had to have me naturally. Now, not only was I breech, but I wasn’t even a normal butt-first breech birth - I came out feet first. According to my mum, the doctor just went, “get me the biggest scissors we have” and sliced her four ways so that I could get out lol.
Now, once I was born there were also apparently a lot of things wrong with me. For one, because of the weird ass position i had been in the womb, I was stuck at a ~120 degree angle: when lying down on my back, my legs would stick right up into the air.
I don’t know how long it took for that to be fixed, but I am certainly straight now. (Well….). I also had a big-ass thing called a goiter on my neck - my head was bent in a weird angle too, which made it crooked, and goitered my neck. Apparently it took a while to get that fixed. I guess I was also born with one leg longer than the other, because this is still the case now and has resulted in lower back problems for years - sometimes, when it’s really bad I can barely walk. In fact, right after I write this, I’m being made by the campus doctor to go to a traditional chinese medicine hospital where they’re going to do something to my back. I also had jaundice, but like all babies have that, so eh.
It was not until I was 13 and, to my horror, made to get glasses, that another defect was discovered. Apparently, when I was born, the lens in my left eye was slanted (I’m noticing an off-axis trend here), causing my lens to develop deformed. This is why I have nearly perfect vision in my right eye, and can see blurry fuck all out of my left eye. As a result, to my glee, I couldn’t wear glasses, instead having to use a contact lens on only my left eye that was meant to reshape my lens. Given that I had also just gotten braces, I was very grateful for this slanted lens that meant I wouldn’t also be aesthetically burdened with another nerd factor. I don’t know what happened with that, but I now have glasses, and they really disorient people when they try them on.
So, when you consider all this, along with my genetic disposition for (an in many cases, acquisition of) depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, ovarian cancer, varicose veins, sinus collapse, and red hair, you may understand why I feel as if I was doomed from the start. I was born off-kilter, I am off-kilter, and who knows what I may fall off of.
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