A year or so later I found myself on the floor of a trailer in Ocean City, Maryland, making out with a guy who was way less patient with my makeshift breasts. And yes, I’m going to blow by the whole “floor of a trailer” piece. There’s not much to say about it besides that I make strong choices, people. Trust me, I wish hooking up with guys on beer-and blood-stained carpets was anomalous back then, but since I wasn’t really introduced to the concept of dignity until like twelve years later, let’s just say I had a lot of rug burn on my lower back for a couple weeks following many a spring break.
The Maryland guy was older and somewhat experienced, so he was able to unclasp one bra with one hand. I remember thinking he must be a magician or something because it took me three or four tries with two hands and I did it every day. I now know he was probably just promiscuous and that I’m very lucky he didn’t give me herpes or whatever the hip STD was back then. I thought he should be my boyfriend, so decided it was worth taking my muddle of bras off and back then I thought nudity was a surefire way to make someone love you. I took one off, then another, then another. I was like one of those Russian nesting dolls, but with way deader eyes.
Once all the layers came off, I remember him looking at my chest quizzically. His face had a mixture of confusion and sympathy, basically every emotion except arousal. I was of course mortified but also slightly validated that someone else saw the same thing I saw. Something was wrong. He avoided my boob altogether for the remaining three hours of our drunken, seemingly endless, completely unenjoyable hookup. I didn’t get a boyfriend out of it, but I did get even more insecure about my Picasso-y chest.
By the time I turned fourteen, I was getting impatient. I wanted my symmetrical boobs and I wanted them now. Getting good grades and being funny was getting exhausting, and I wanted the free attention from my dad that my stepmother Jessica got so effortlessly.
The major curveball within this incongruence of curves was that, as you know if you read the last chapter, this was around when my eating disorder decided to hijack my brain. If you didn’t read the last chapter, this paragraph is going to be deeply baffling. The eating disorder therapist told me that not eating would cause my breast tissue to stop growing, but my eating disorder told me she was a lying, cunning psycho who was dead set on sabotaging my happiness, so I didn’t listen. Given how little protein I was eating, my long-awaited period had stopped, and so did the lopsided growth of my chest. This is pretty obvious, but if you don’t eat, breast tissue can’t grow, and since breasts have fatty tissue in them, when you lose weight, they are often the first to go. As you know, I didn’t get a handle on eating again until my mid-twenties, so essentially my eating disorder smashed my dreams of a perfect chest.
When I was about nineteen, I moved to L.A. and promptly fell madly in love with a guy. Let me rephrase that: I became magnetically attracted to a man who perfectly re-created my childhood circumstances, but I was conditioned to think that was “love at first sight.” This was before I had any addiction or codependence therapy, so I basically moved in with anyone who reminded me of my dad. This guy was nomadic, randomly flying from L.A. to New York, keeping me in a state of paralyzing anxiety that I thought could only be true love. You now know that this was me in the glory days of my codependence, which was taking hold and distorting my reality like a funhouse mirror in desperate need of Windex.
I became very, very preoccupied with let’s call him Mark. Where he was, what he was doing, what he wasn’t doing, what I could do to make him do what I wanted him to do . . . I didn’t yet know that other people weren’t responsible for my emotional needs, so I exhausted myself with high expectations and emotional perfectionism. After reading Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix, easily my least favorite title of my most favorite book, I realized that Mark had all the negative qualities of my primary caretakers, which is part of why I was so magnetically attracted to him. He triggered my comfort zone of emotions: uncertainty, anxiety, self-doubt. These feelings gave me the drug I could never get enough of: adrenaline. It made me feel alive, awake, and like I was in a sexy action movie. Because of my tendency to emotionally time travel, my subconscious mind concluded that getting him to love me would heal all my old, bleeding invisible wounds. I know what you’re thinking—back in my twenties, I was a real catch.
Mark often had lunch with one of his platonic girlfriends, of whom I was insanely jealous but pretended not to be, desperate to come off as the “cool girl.” I mean, she ate lunch. Who eats lunch? They hung out and I pretended not to care. Long story longer, I ended up flying to New York to see him for the Christmas holiday. And by see him, I mean check up on and micromanage his behavior because I had old abandonment fear coming up and which made me unable to breathe. One day Mark was out working and I was left alone in his apartment. Now, let me just remind you about the mis-wired neural pathways I had back then before I admit the terrible decisions I made that night: I had seen adultery growing up, I was in the haze of my codependence and addictive behaviors, and I was also very, very hungry. I would never do this today, but kids . . . I went through his computer. I managed to guess his password, which is shocking, given that today I forget my own password easily twice a week.
I found nothing. Mostly just trying-too-hard photos of me I had sent him in the hopes of making him think I didn’t try too hard. This was before I knew my angles and how to put makeup on, so the photos looked more like I had been taken hostage by a high school yearbook photographer. After sleuthing for a while, I was ready to give up on finding something incriminating that would give me a hit of my beloved drug, adrenaline, until I had the very insane but also straight-up brilliant idea to go into his trash folder. I know, I’m a sick, sick genius. When I opened it, a cornucopia of photos of breasts appeared before me as if a pimp had made a PowerPoint presentation. This trash folder had almost as many boobs as the Instagram “discover” page. My heart sank. So did my stomach and lungs and liver and uterus. This is of course a rough situation for any girl, but I think my body took it as an opportunity to release a bunch of old repressed pain I had never processed, so the floodgates of emotion opened with a bang. As I cried, I felt a deep pain in my bones, like twenty ghosts were beating me up.