I am willing to share a lot about myself and of myself. I am willing to give a lot to make others happy. These characteristics are (stereo)typically feminine–acculturated traits of femaleness that are indicative of patriarchal power that naturalized within women and used in the maintenance of gendered societal and familial roles and expectations. While the way I express my emotions and care for others has roots in my upbringing and runs deeply through my thought processes (or is the foundation on which my thoughts are built) I also recognize that I perform a very typical (hetero)normative femininity at a conscious level. Part of the performance of my identity is the fact that, growing up very overweight, I never felt like a girl. Until I was about 17 and I dropped from 200+ pounds to about 175, I dressed in young mens clothes, which were, in my mind, much ‘cooler’ than the plus sized women’s clothing I had to wear to fit my 5’2″ size 18 body (yes, now we have more fashionable clothing in bigger sizes, but this was the late ’90s before the body affirmation movements).
With my little brother, summer 1995, age 13.
Fall 1997, age 15.
But after I lost that initial 30 pounds during my senior year of high school and was able to purchase the largest size available in the juniors’ department, I felt more girly. I started wearing flair leg jeans, skirts, and dresses, and, being a larger size girl in her late teens, I had developed an ample bosom (haha), so I purchased some low cut tops. This drew attention. Boys in high school don’t really like ‘chubby’ girls, but they do like boobs.
Me and a friend, High School Senior Banquet, 2000, age 18.
And so, boobs became my defining trait. I was the chubby, smart, funny girl with the dry sense of humor who also had boobs. I never really saw myself as attractive, or felt that others thought I was, because I was still significantly overweight. Now, over my entire life I have had more male friends than most girls I knew. During high school my core group of friends was guys. Most never showed any interest in anything beyond friendship. A couple did. Their friends made fun of them. Because of my relationships with guys and my interpretation of my own body and attractiveness, I am, to this day, incapable of determining if guys are hitting on me or just think I’m interesting for a chat (even after my last two boyfriends telling me, flat out, that men don’t chat with women they don’t want to get with). I usually figure out a guy is interested in my after I end up with his number in my phone and he texts me asking when we’re gonna go out (or something more obscene and/or stalkerish).
Photos from my sister’s wedding, July 2009 when I was 27. Left: bachelorette party (I’m on the left); Right: Giving the poorly prepared maid-of-honor speech.
Wait, let’s go back a minute. Or a few years. When I started my PhD, I also took a close look at my life and realized the body I had was not only unhealthy, but also, and moreover, not the way I wanted to represent myself in the world. I began taking long walks in the mornings, doing exercise videos, and biking trails by my condo. I went down 2 clothing sizes during my first semester– from a 12 to a 8. At the time I was also in a long-term relationship (that should have never even gotten off the ground, but that’s another story), one that lasted 8.5 years and concluding during finals week of the first semester of my program when said individual informed me that he began seeing a therapist and she told him I was the root of his depression (or whatever fucking thing she decided he was afflicted with) and that, because of this, he wanted to break up (despite me telling him that a long distance relationship wasn’t going to work 4 months prior, before I moved away to begin school). This was December 2009. The ‘loss’ (there are good losses) of my long-term boyfriend only intensified my commitment to becoming the person I wanted to be. If I didn’t want to end up with another of him, I would need to become more comfortable in myself, to find the person I thought I deserved, to not settle. I intensified my workouts. I moved out of my condo to an apartment building that had a fitness center. For the first time in my life, I was working out. It started slow, but I knew I had to amp it up over time. By the end of the spring semester, I was down to a size 4. By the following fall I weighed 125–the same number I saw on the scale when I was in 5th grade and my pediatrician told my mother my weight was a problem and the school nurse began to monitor it with the logic that this would somehow motivate me to get in shape. Clearly, that didn’t work, as it took almost 20 years for me to convince myself I needed to change and that I could change.
Left: Day of sister’s wedding (July 2009), age 27; Right: Goal accomplished: fifth grade weight (September 2011), age 29.
Studies show that most people who go through a massive weight loss do not keep the weight off for more than a year. But I had maintained. I have maintained. This is commitment. However, what one does not know as a little fat kid is that, as you gain weight and your skin stretches, it doesn’t necessarily retract if/when you do eventually lose weight… or that the skins elasticity decreases when significantly stretched over time… or that fair skin (like that of your truly) has less elasticity to begin with. So, yeah, I lost 90 fucking pounds and was stuck with the skin of a 200 pound person draped over a 115 pound body. People would look and see me with this ‘perfect little body’, held in by compression pants, carefully tucked into waist bands, boosted up by the optimal shaping demi bra, and think I was athletic– a dancer, a gymnast, whatever… I was none of these (my sister got to take dance classes, I didn’t, once again, another story for another time)… The first gym I joined was Fitness First in Rockville, Maryland in November 2011, after I had already reached my goal weight. I was too embarrassed to even join a gym before this point. All the muscle in the world does not, however, help loose skin, nor does it help your deflated boobs (yes, boobs are made of fat, so when you lose weight, you lose boob). My boobs, my signifying bodily feature were gone. I was now the pretty, smart, athletic girl with beautiful eyes.
Summer 2015, age 33.
In all honesty, I didn’t mind having small boobs. They worked out well for running and yoga. No bouncing even in the cheapest low-support sports bra. But, without coverage, they looked like sad balloons. But my stomach was worse in my mind. The skin just hung. I couldn’t take a bath because the sight of my skin, buoyant in the water, made me depressed. I couldn’t look at myself naked unless I was laying flat on my back, in that position my skin would appear tight and I felt I looked ‘normal’.
Men have never complained, questioned, or expressed disgust with my body. My feelings about my body are all my own. I own them, while I also recognize they are based on cultural ideals of what an athletic, firm female body should look like. My desire to see myself as beautiful (or pretty)–the way that others had seen me–was the motivating factor in my decision to get cosmetic surgery. I wanted my body to fully reflect the goals I worked so hard to achieve–to remove the excess to bring my body inline with my mind and to help me realize that I was ‘ok’ that there was nothing more I had to do but maintain. And medical professionals agreed–there was nothing more I could do to ‘fix’ my body. In fact, most doctors, nurses, and even nutritionists are surprised when I tell them that I lost this weigh on my own without surgery and without even the help of a dietician or trainer. I did this myself. It was actually hard to admit that I couldn’t fix this one last thing.
At first, I thought I just wanted an abdominoplasty. I did research. I need to be certain that I wanted it and I found that, despite the invasiveness and intense healing process, the grey photos and youtube videos, I did. I also saw patients would undergo different levels of skin excision and often multiple surgeries at once–lipo with abdominoplasty with breast lifts/implants–this was all dependent on desired outcome and amount of weight lost (or sucked out). The more I looked at myself and the more I considered my struggles with my excess, the more I saw that I wanted to address the total issue, at once, to make it all match. However, the whole thing was extremely cost prohibitive; a pie in the sky dream. And, while I thought, in part based on cost, I would eventually get the tummy tuck, see how it went, and decide on the boobs later, when my boyfriend of two years saw my struggles with my image and offered to help me, obtaining the total package in one shot became a possibility.
I know, I know… this doesn’t help my case. A MAN BOUGHT ME COSMETIC SURGERY. I unnecessarily put myself at risk for vanity. Yet, this is a myopic view of my relationship to my body and my relationship to him.
I didn’t want big boobs I just had room and wanted to fill out what was missing (there was room for bigger implants, I choose the size I have–375cc–making my final bra size a 32c, up from a 32/34a). To be honest, my boyfriend wouldn’t have complained about larger. In fact, if it were his choice, he may have picked larger. However, I picked the size that I was comfortable with, and while, as a noted people pleaser, I looked to him for him input, he completely put the decision in my hands–it is my body, it was, therefore, my choice.
It was risky business. I have never had surgery, never been under anesthetics, never even admitted to a hospital. It was also expensive. It also, when construed through the lens of feminist scholarship, makes me appear as having given into the ‘male gaze’ or the patriarchy or social expectations. It really makes it seem like I hated my body and, perhaps, myself. I guess, in part, I was trying to get away from something, but I carry in me the culmination of my life’s experiences. There is no way for me to forget how I was ‘the fat friend’, ‘more cushin’ for the pushin”, or the ‘…but she has a cute face’.
Me (right) and my best friend, 1989, age 7. I was her “fat friend Allison” (see, it has a ring to it).
The person I am inside of the body I have now is what shapes my perspective of the world and the way in interact with and empathize with others in it. Because the choice to have this operation is part of me both inside and out, I don’t need people to not see it, but I do want them to understand it.
July 2016, age 34.
Recently, I have become concerned about the risks associated with my choice to have breast augmentation in specific. But I have claimed, from the get-go, that if I just had small breasts, not deflated, sad breasts that made me feel unsexy, I would have never done this. The risks I have encountered were part vanity, part emotional/mental stability. There are a number of women who are unhappy with their choices, who have encountered severe complications, and who have gotten botched surgeries, and there is always the risk that something could go wrong with my implants down the line (and yes, they have a limited life and will have to be removed/replaced at some point over a decade from now), but cosmetic surgery, like all science, is constantly evolving and new developments make these procedures and materials involved in them safer. Yet, at present, worse than the potential for something to go wrong with my boobs is fact that my lower abdominal region is still tingly with numbness and feels tight as a rubber band (which makes for some awkward yoga backbends). The scars are still fading and will never be gone. I am not perfect. You can’t even buy perfect.
A scar that runs hip to hip–one that still swells when I do intense ab exercises and makes me feel a bit awkward in the locker room, but that I have decided to own and to talk about, should anyone ask.
But I made a choice and am happy with my appearance. I feel more confident in my skin. I also feel like I gave into the status quo, which I simply have to accept and own–hence this blog post.
Nothing in life is certain and there are very few things that are permanent. While the choices we make today have an impact on our tomorrows, making it though today as a confident person ensures our tomorrows, enables us to find happiness… whatever that may be, still not sure.
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