I’ve finally surrendered to the body I have, self-inflicted wounds and all. Today I’m in a place where I can have sex without contorting my body like I’m playing a sad game of Twister. I figure if a guy is turned off by whatever naked asymmetry I have, he’s in his own struggle with his body and maybe his attraction to ones that have a penis attached to them.
Ultimately, as Stockholm syndrome-y as it sounds, I’m grateful that I went through this fiasco. I didn’t want to spend my life looking at stunted breast tissue. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being reminded of my eating disorder every time I took my shirt off. I wanted to be free of that obsession and see what it would be like not to be in an adversarial relationship with my body. Oddly, I like my scars. They look like little smiley faces. Of course they’re shaped that way for medical reasons, not my mental health goals, but there’s something poetic about seeing little smiles every time I look at my chest and am tempted to critique it.
Also, when I was nervously asking the second surgeon about what would happen if he cut into the scars I already had, he said, “Even better. Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue.” This made me want to cry when I heard it. I felt like going through all this made me weak. Turns out, when we make mistakes and glue ourselves back together, we end up being way stronger than we were before.
I don’t feel sexier or anything now, and on some level I still replaced one insecurity with another. Instead of worrying that my boobs are weirdly shaped and crooked, I now worry people will think I’m shallow and dumb for having had corrective surgery. That said, if I broke my ankle, I’d go get it fixed, so I know that if anything in my body or brain is broken, that also deserves to get fixed, regardless of how society glamorizes, sexualizes, or minimizes it.
The whole boob debacle did make me think a lot not only about my own shame, but also about why we shame others for doing things that may seem superficial but are likely rooted in real pain or suffering. I no longer look at women who get a nose job or whatever corrective surgery as self-absorbed narcissists. I see them as victims of cripplingly low self-worth. I’m sure there are shallow people who get work done for a mess of unsavory reasons, but expanding my brain to consider the kaleidoscope of pathos that could motivate someone to do such a thing has given me a tremendous amount of compassion. The same way trying to help someone who has an eating disorder can make the disorder worse, shaming insecure people just exacerbates their insecurity. It’s like one big emotional rat king.
It’s healthy that we’re all having a public conversation about the damage being done by online bullying and trolls, but I don’t hear enough talk about how we bully ourselves. As rough as what some people write about me in comments sections online is, none of it is as mean as the things my inner voices say about me. Trolls, this is not a challenge; I’m just trying to make a point here. If other people bully me, that’s a reflection on them and something I can choose not to internalize, but if I’m beating myself up, that’s on me.
So, here I am, releasing my shame so I don’t have to carry it around until it turns into another weird addictive behavior like sniffing glue or obsessively ordering clothes I can’t afford online and then frantically returning them. And, look, if you have judgments about my past and my choices, it’s all good. Turns out, with or without your approval, I’ll be just fine.
THE HEADACHE CHAPTER
My head has hurt for as long as I can remember. As a kid I recall being at school, looking at corny posters on the walls with cartoon birds holding up vocabulary words, and being frustrated that I couldn’t read the words I could so easily spell the day before. I remember having to sit in the car at Disneyland with Mickey Mouse ears over my eyes because the sun was so painful to look at. My parents argued outside the car, trying to figure out if they would go on with the day at the most magical place on earth or go home because of me. Maybe that was the genesis of my paralyzing guilt.
“I’m totally fine! We can stay!” I yelled, each utterance exacerbating the pounding in my skull. It tore me up that my headaches caused other people to miss out on a day of fun and spinning teacups. The only good news is that now that I’m an adult and have some perspective, I know if my parents weren’t fighting about me, they’d have been fighting about something else, so maybe I did everyone a favor by giving them something tangible to argue about.
I spent a tremendous amount of time in the nurse’s office in middle school. Very frequently for my swollen knee and head lice, but also for my incessant headaches. Up until I was about twelve, headaches were my biggest, well, headache. My parents didn’t spend a lot of time going to doctors, and I didn’t think to question that approach. Like a lot of families headed by parents raised by men who served in various wars, my family had a white-knuckle philosophy toward pain. Buck up, man up, grow some balls. So I learned how to do two of those three things.