Massimo’s Evidence
By Massimo Di Grazia
When you are in your teens, life is not easy. It becomes hard to confront for both you and your parents, but when you must deal with urogenital problems, it is an even more complex question. In my case, the problem was “vesical exstrophy” (VE), also called bladder exstrophy. I’m writing it in quotation marks to give it back the importance it has always had in my whole life. I see VE in my life as a strongly formative event, a condition that allowed me to have a different point of view. Nevertheless, my life doesn’t rotate around this pathology. I would like to share this point with you all.
Looking back, when I was in my teens I always used to fight both with my parents and with my friends, but most of all with girls. I felt that mutual attraction was bringing me to open a relationship with my body before I could establish another one with a girl’s body. At the beginning, I felt a strong restlessness for other people and even a stronger intolerance for myself. Thus, I became reserved and uncommunicative, and other people seemed to perceive me as a cold, unfeeling person. I suffered because of this idea that I believed other people had of me, and therefore, sometimes I didn’t live according to the real needs of someone my age or my real identity as a teenager. I used to live life looking for strong sensations of living, sometimes also with a self-injuring approach.
Getting older, changing friends, starting to work, and knowing other girls, I started to look at VE with different eyes. I tried to get in touch with it, and I began to really taste what was there of good and bad in me and around myself. Rage and physical and mental suffering made me live in a body I didn’t really accept, with a sensation of frustration, asking myself, “Why is this happening to me?” I needed to see all this clearly, to look at it more deeply. I chose my path, and it was not easy, but suffering helped me to pass through that period of a self-injuring approach and then to accept my condition and to have a different vision: a positive relationship with my body that allowed me to accept myself as I am.
I tasted life’s flavors. I loved and I received love. Now I am happy to share all the gifts of life with all the people in my life. If I were asked to express a wish, I would ask for my life, exactly as it is, without any change, because it allowed me to become a very sensitive person. It also helped me to understand femininity, and now there is a woman by my side to share with me a real couple’s life and to form a family.