What It Feels Like When Transition Is Over

I made the fatal mistake last night of leaving the TV on and forgetting to disable YouTube autoplay.

I woke at about 5 a.m. in my hospital room to Ramesh Ranganathan interviewing Sophie Ellis-Bextor. What a genuinely lovely woman. I really liked her. She should be my friend.

That was followed by a programme celebrating 25 years of The Fast Show. I’d forgotten how much of it I knew. Every single catchphrase. Every sketch. I’d also forgotten how funny it actually was. And how sad it is that Caroline Aherne is gone. She should’ve been my friend too.

After that, I spent about half an hour tidying up my hospital room, moving slowly, carefully, being gently told off by my body.

And while I was doing that, something became obvious.

I felt flat.

Not sad.

Not regretful.

Not relieved in the way I expected.

Just flat. A muted, slightly puzzling now what?

That was the part I hadn’t anticipated. Not because I expected fireworks, but because I thought I would feel something more definite. Instead there was a kind of emotional quiet, as if a background hum I hadn’t noticed before had suddenly been switched off.

I’m lying in the WIH hospital now.

It’s day ten.

I have successfully done a wee something like twelve times. Who’s counting?

I’m counting.

Everything is technically fine. Healing is progressing. Nothing is “wrong”.

And yet that flatness is still there.

To understand why that surprised me, it probably helps to understand what “over” actually means in my case.

In the last seven months, I’ve had:

full facial FFS

a separate deep plane facelift and neck lift

cheek implants plus additional fat grafting

breast augmentation

two rounds of liposuction

a Brazilian butt lift

an extended tummy tuck

vaginoplasty

and an alarming amount of skin treatments involving various lasers

(Yes, I know. Please form an orderly queue to call me a show-off bitch. You may take some comfort in the fact that I will almost certainly be living on dog food in my retirement, having enthusiastically raided my pension the moment I turned 55 in order to pay for all this.)

This wasn’t chaos or impulse. It was executed as a tightly planned programme.

I broke my body into regions.

Lower body first.

Then upper body.

Then, three months later, lower body again.

Each block was sequenced to maximise healing for the areas about to be operated on, while other areas recovered. Everything was timeline-driven. Everything had dependencies. Everything had recovery buffers.

This wasn’t “I kept getting surgeries”.

This was a mission.

And now the mission is over.

Lying there, letting that flatness sit, something clicked.

I’ve been here before.

The day after a full Ironman triathlon feels exactly like this.

Not the race itself.

Not the 2.4-mile swim.

Not the 112 miles on the bike that come after it.

Not even the moment where, somehow, you get off the bike and run a full marathon on legs that should no longer work.

Not the suffering.

Not the achievement.

The day after.

That strange, hollow morning when you wake up and realise the thing you organised your entire life around has already happened. The training plans stop. The structure collapses. The calendar goes quiet. The single fixed point that gave every day its meaning is suddenly behind you.

Years ago, Ironman became my life in exactly that way. I planned obsessively. I trained obsessively. Everything bent itself around one immovable date.

And then one day you do it.

You finish.

You get the medal.

And then the next morning?

Flatness.

Not because you failed.

But because the mission is complete.

Years later, what you realise is that Ironman was never about the medal. It was about the process. The discipline. The planning. The commitment to becoming someone else.

This morning, lying in a hospital bed in Bangkok, I realised something that stopped me in my tracks.

I used the exact same project management techniques to plan my transition as I did to plan Ironman.

The same Kanban boards.

The same timeline blocks.

The same dependency management.

The same tolerance for discomfort in service of a future self I could see clearly but not yet inhabit.

Different domain.

Identical psychology.

Both had fixed dates.

Both organised years of my life.

Both required faith, endurance, and a willingness to keep going when motivation alone wasn’t enough.

And now both are done.

The difference, of course, is this.

After Ironman, unless you walk around telling everyone you ever meet that you did an Ironman, which yes, I absolutely did, cringe!!!!!!!. The medal goes in a drawer. Life moves on.

This time, there is a permanent outcome.

A body I live in.

A reality that doesn’t get put away.

And yet the same flatness still arrives.

Because flatness isn’t about the outcome.

It’s about the end of the mission.

I think we’re sold a lie that arrival should feel euphoric.

It rarely does.

Arrival is quiet.

Arrival is the absence of striving.

Arrival is the removal of a background strain you’ve lived with for so long you forgot it was there.

And for people like me, people who organise their lives around missions, that absence can feel unsettling before it feels peaceful.

One thing I am genuinely looking forward to now is a period of healing.

Proper healing.

Unsettling, quiet healing.

I don’t believe the human body could take much more than I gave it. This was the maximum load. I took advice from my surgeons on this, and they assured me that what I was doing was safe and reasonable, but it was still the upper limit.

And I can feel that now.

So I am looking forward to gentler days. To recovery. To acceptance. To letting my mind catch up with what my body has already done.

When a mission ends, there is always a pause.

Then, eventually, another mission forms.

Not because I’m broken.

Not because I need fixing.

But because this is how I move through the world.

I don’t know yet what the next one is.

And for now, that’s okay.

A Few Weeks Later

I wrote most of this a few weeks ago.

At the time, I wasn’t sure it was very good, so I almost left it unpublished.

I’m reading it again now, the day before I fly home from Bangkok, and I can see its not a bad article!! This wasn’t a weak piece. It was a piece written from inside the pause.

And in the pause, something else has started to form.

I can feel the outline of another mission.

Nothing surgical. Nothing corrective. Nothing involving anaesthetists, drains, or compression garments.

This one is simpler.

We pick a hard date.

We book a photo shoot.

We decide that on that date, I will stand in a bikini, and I will look fucking good.

Four months. Maybe five. I haven’t fixed it yet.

But I know myself well enough to know this: I don’t drift towards futures. I move towards them by committing to dates.

So this is not about fixing a body.

It’s about inhabiting it.

Recovering. Healing. Training. Getting strong again.

A new mission

So here’s to the pause.

And here’s to what comes next.