He explained how to reconstruct the reconstruction. I don’t remember anything he said, but I trusted him.
After he did the procedure, Dr. Actual Doctor told me he was able to minimize the damage, but not fix it entirely. This should probably have been disappointing, but I was too sick of the whole debacle to be anything but okay with it.
Today I accept my chest, but not because it’s symmetrical or better or any of that. The truth is, if I was twenty-five with the boobs I have now, I’m sure I’d hate them for some other reason my brain invents to re-create the cycle of feeling like I’m broken. Before I had self-esteem, I could find a flaw in anything related to myself and used any excuse I could find to beat myself up. I’m sure I would have found issues with even the most gorgeous naturals: “Yuck! They’re too pale and way too round! I mean, a C cup? C is the universal sign for average!”
What ultimately made me accept and like my body was the tremendous amount of work I did on my brain. Trust me, I wish the shortcuts had worked, but they just didn’t. Being thin didn’t work. Eating thirty cookies at a time didn’t work. Being on TV didn’t work. Symmetrical boobs didn’t work. Boyfriends didn’t work. Work didn’t work. Money didn’t work. I mean, it can really help sometimes, but it doesn’t fix low self-worth. If actual worth and self-worth were synonymous, #lambolife would not be a hashtag on social media.
Before I did work on my insides, self-acceptance felt like a mythical utopian ideal. All over Instagram and pop culture we see memes that say “love yourself” and “accept who you are” in flowery font. Great. But how? If reading a quote on Instagram or listening to a Justin Bieber song could change your neurology about how you actually see yourself, every rehab would instantly go out of business. The same way a quote about getting in shape can’t actually get you in shape, self-esteem is a muscle you actually have to build. But how?
The first thing I did was get older. It really helps.
Another thing that’s helped in building my self-esteem has been surrounding myself with people who aren’t assholes. This may sound obvious, but until pretty recently I had a lot of people in my life who didn’t treat me with respect. That’s of course because I didn’t treat myself with respect, so it became a vicious circle, given a very complex phenomenon I’d like to reduce to “monkey see, monkey do.” We take cues from others on how we should feel about ourselves, so when the people around me are mean, I tend to imitate them. Negative people are very sneaky. They’re like a Taylor Swift song: the first couple times you hear it, you want to leave the room, but after four or five times, I’m dancing like a white girl with sciatica.
People’s opinion of you rubs off on you. It sounds so simple: Be friends with people who accept you for who you are and don’t make you feel scared or insecure or as though you have to constantly work for their approval. I’ve probably said this a couple times in this book, but in case you’re anything like me and read books like a spaz by skimming through chapters, love is not earned. I’ll repeat that: Love is not earned. To quote Sia, “I know I’ve heard that to let your feelings show / Is the only way to make friendships grow.” If you can’t be vulnerable with your pals, they gotta go. If I had just been able to admit my dilemma to someone ten years earlier because I had safe, nonjudgmental friendships, I probably would have saved a lot of time, money, pain, and perverted hallucinations from coming out of anesthesia that involve Tom Hardy.
Anyway, so why would I write this chapter? Why would I tell you guys my deepest, darkest, most embarrassing secret? Why would I admit to being a hypocrite? Why would I give out information that’s going to invite so many nasty tweets and countless emotionally abusive Instagram comments? Something that’s going to get me so many awkward backhanded compliments from strangers in airports? Because I have shame about it. And I learned that the engine of codependent, self-abusive, maladaptive, and addictive behaviors is exactly that. Shame. But shame can be mitigated or released in a shockingly simple way: by talking about it. The badass psychiatrist Phil Stutz said something on Marc Maron’s podcast that I’ll never forget, which is that when we admit something shameful, it loses its power and it allows grace to enter the room.
So here I am, telling you the most shameful thing I hold on to so I can drop my sword, put the boxing gloves down, and accept my relentless humanity so I can get on with living my life. The only panacea I’ve found for negative thoughts is to admit my negative thoughts. I’m sure painkillers and wine work too, but probably not for long, and they’re way more expensive. It’s pretty much my main goal in life not to have to go to get my emotional needs met at BevMo!.
To quote a real authority on shame who knows way more than I do, Brené Brown said: “Where perfectionism exists, shame is always lurking.” In order to heal my crippling perfectionism, I had to release the shame by talking about it. You know when you’ve drunk too much or get food poisoning, and you actually feel relieved after you puke? Puking feels terrible, but you’re grateful to not have that garbage in your body anymore? Maybe that is a terrible image for the chapter following one about eating disorders, but it’s the most accurate metaphor I can think of besides popping a zit, which is too gross for me to even think about. Sorry, now you’re thinking about it.
When I was trying to figure out whether or not I should write this chapter, I devoured Brené Brown’s quotes. I came across one from her book The Gifts of Imperfection: “Authenticity is a collection of choices we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” As I told more and more people, I realized that (a) they didn’t really care because everyone is too busy dealing with their own emotional problems to care about my emotional problems and (b) most had struggled with similar issues and felt relieved and inspired that I could be vulnerable about mine. When this happened, my fear of judgment lost its power over me. Maybe the road to being a decent role model wasn’t about being emotionally perfect, maybe it was about finding the courage to admit that I wasn’t.