The Breast Years of Your Life… And All the Ones that Come After
The primary motion is to draw imaginary circles on either side, and turn them towards each other endlessly. The article said the only way it works is if I do it at least eighty times for thirty nights straight. The first thing I noticed upon trying it out was that the friction made it difficult to move consistently — my palms weren’t making the whole trip around. So I kept a bottle of baby oil under my pillow. Baby oil, because I was fourteen and I couldn’t afford the herb-infused blends the article said would speed up the growth process. But actually, I’d started to save up for better oils — the really tiny ones from Bath and Body Works. At fourteen, I should have been spending my money on Nutella doughnuts from Krispy Kreme on a Friday afternoon, or on the leather boots I’d been eyeing in the shop window for weeks on end. But hey, anything for bigger boobs.
When I look back now at the brief period in my teenage life where I would climb to the top bunk of my boarding school bed, hit play on an illegally downloaded episode of Friends, diligently smother my hands in baby oil, and apply natural breast enhancement strategies unto myself, it doesn’t seem all that strange anymore. It wasn’t insane, it wasn’t unhinged, it was me simply doing what I thought was best with the cards I’d been dealt. Let’s say a group of high school bullies threw a banana peel directly into your path every day along the school hallway. Wouldn’t you naturally plan out a different route or show up in special anti-slip shoes? In other words, it was the ninth grade, and I did what I needed to do to survive.
I knew early on that I didn’t have a lot going on in that area. I knew because my roommates and I tried out the ‘pencil test’ from Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging in freshman year, and mine dropped the second I placed it on.We laughed about it and it was no big deal. Then ninth grade happened, and everyone was growing in all sorts of directions. The guys were getting jawlines and having push-up competitions, the girls were fitting annoyingly better into their P.E. uniforms. I grew taller, but all that did was emphasise the fact that I had straight lines where my waist should be, and a back for a chest.
At first, the comments came in bursts. They were observations and conversation fillers — the sorts of things to which I would say “what do you mean you don’t like your boobs? give some of it to me, then!”. But soon enough, the jokes started catching fire, and the worst part was that I seemed to be in on it. I was such a good sport about it, too. I would pull the padding out of my pushup bra like it was a magic trick, all because somebody wanted to see how stuffed it actually was in there.
And so maybe I had laughed at the jokes so often that people felt they could make them even when I wasn’t around. I remember my friend telling me that she was hanging out with some of our classmates, and they were talking about the girls in class. When my name came up, one of the guys said ‘Amber? She’s flat as a board.’ And I spent the entire night swallowing that pill. It could very easily have been, ‘Amber? Yeah she’s really nice’, or ‘Amber? She’s super smart’; it didn’t even need to be ‘Amber? Oh she’s breathtakingly gorgeous and will most likely beat out Blake Lively for World’s Sexiest Woman’. It just needed to be something — anything — else. But it wasn’t.
I started to keep a list of every particularly bad thing people would say about my boobs or my appearance in general. I would note it down immediately after I heard it. I guess it helped with the anger and the frustration. I hated myself for taking it. I hated that every time someone would ask me if I was wearing a push-up bra, I would say ‘how’d you know?’. I hated myself for posting things like ‘I may have small boobs, but I have a big heart’ on Twitter. But beyond the hatred and anger, I mainly just felt confused.
I didn’t understand why I couldn’t stand up for myself, or why I actually didn’t want to. I wanted people to stop because they realised I was beautiful and great and interesting, not because I couldn’t take a joke. And besides, it wasn’t like my life was a complete disaster. Sure, I was subject to frequent bra foam poking, but for the most part, I was alright. I had incredible roommates. I was writing better poetry. And I had Brad.
I could be ninety-six and shakily writing my dying words into the diary I would conveniently place somewhere for a Netflix producer to find, and my favourite memory of youth would still be this: Me, watching One Tree Hill at 2 AM. Brad, shooting me an out-of-nowhere message about a song that reminded him of me. Me, receiving it and glancing back at the screen to see Haley and Nathan kiss for the first time as Dare You to Move by Switchfoot played in the background. Brad, talking to me the entire night through, and Me, smiling myself to sleep.
I liked Brad for a number of reasons. First, because he was very cute. Second, because we liked the same bands. I was in my emo phase, and Brad and I would sit next to each other on bus rides and listen to The Killers, The Fray, My Chemical Romance, Mayday Parade, you name it. Third, because he flirted with me, like actually, flirted with me. He once told me at 2 AM on Facebook that he had the key to unlock the maze of my heart, and I was just completely destroyed by it. Fourth, when it was just the two of us, he never made jokes about my body. And fifth, he trusted me with his feelings. When he was sad about not being able to talk to his ballerina crush from the year above us, he would come to me. So obviously, only one of us was an active player in this skinny love story. But with the way we would both sing along to FM Static when ‘Now I’m jumping up and down, she’s the only one around, she means every little thing to meeee’ came on, I couldn’t help but think that maybe he didn’t love me right now, but he could love me. If it wasn’t now, it would definitely be later.
We slow danced to Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol at our school’s version of a Christmas Ball. I had spent most of the morning thinking about how to tell him I liked him. “Brad, I really like it when we listen to music together and when you let me sleep on your shoulder on the bus ride home. Oh, and I really like you”? Or, “Brad, I know I’m not a beautiful ballerina who looks so much like Ariana Grande it’s freaky, but I like you so much and you simply can’t deny that you kind of like me, too”. Chasing Cars is four minutes and twenty eight seconds long. But the song was over before I could look him in the eye and say thanks for a great year. At the end of the night, I took off my costume, fell asleep with my makeup on, and packed for the holiday break.
The morning after, my sister told me that the pictures of the ball were already up on Facebook, so I flopped onto my bed and looked through them, saving all the cute pictures of me and my roommates at the photo booth, laughing at all the scared-looking freshmen squatting down around the corners. And then I saw it. Oh look, it’s Brad! He’s so cute. He’s dancing with a girl. And wow, there’s zero space for the Holy Spirit in there. Who’s the girl? Why, would you look at that! It’s my best friend, Ana! Why are their heads so smooshed together? And why are their lips smooshed together, too?
In an instant, little chat bubbles began bursting out from my phone. My closest friends, who I’ve regaled a thousand times over about how Brad and I were literal soulmates — asking if I had seen it, and if I was okay.
Next thing I knew, I was on a mission. The photo was quickly taken down, probably because Brad and Ana were just barely done with puberty, so I took it upon myself to talk about it with everyone who would care even the slightest bit. I needed people to be as angry as I was.
But as I fell into bed at 2 AM, there was no more buzzing. I remember pushing my phone under my pillow, just in case someone else was up and wanted to talk about it, and looking down at my blanket bundled body. I remember shifting to the side, then lying chest down — my favorite sleeping position, because I’d always found it pretty cool that girls with big boobs couldn’t do it. I knew I wasn’t nearly as pretty as his ballerina crush, not as pretty as Ana and not as pretty as the kinds of girls he apparently liked to kiss. I knew I didn’t have much going for me. Not up there, not down there, not at the sides, not anywhere. But to be reminded in the cruelest way possible brought a kind of sadness my poor young heart could never have been prepared for. A line from Modern Baseball’s ‘Tears Over Beers’ played over and over in my head.
‘he needed more than me.
i’m friendly and thoughtful
and quite awfully pretty, but he
needed more than me.’
Over the holidays, I took the heartbreak, the betrayal, the anger, the insecurity, and the emptiness, and I soaked it and ground it and boiled it until all the leading supermarkets started calling it soymilk. I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself, so I dealt with it the way any rational human being would. I identified the problem and searched for solutions.
My Problem:
I’ll never be enough for the boy I love.
My Solutions:
1. Soy milk, to increase estrogen levels and promote growth of female body parts
2. Chest exercises for increased definition and toning
3. Dieting to decrease stomach size, thus placing more emphasis on the bust area
4. Massage breasts to stimulate blood circulation, which in turn makes them appear larger, more supple, and more lively
Once I had it all figured out, the next few months felt like a race. I was going through all the motions at lightning speed, and I made sure everybody knew about this journey I was on. I told my classmates why I brought a tetra pack of VitaSoy every morning. I would excuse myself from dinner with my roommates early because I needed to sneak a workout in before doing school requirements. One day, I came to class in a thin shirt and my guy friend actually said, “They’re getting bigger!” To which I responded, “Thank you! I’ve been working really hard!” I didn’t tell a lot of people about the boob massaging. But I was working overtime for it. Eighty circles became a hundred, then a hundred and sixty. One Friends episode became two. You’d be surprised how many circles two Friends episodes count for.
Brad and Ana became boyfriend and girlfriend. They would hold hands in class, and sit together on the stairs. They were conjoined, quite literally, by a pair of wired earphones. I never understood why they listened to EDM, but I had to respect it. I don’t think it’s ever easy to see your soulmate make out with one of your best friends on bus rides home. But my plan was going better than I expected. I wasn’t enough for Brad, but with all the solutions I’d put in place, I was bound to be enough for someone eventually.
Brad and Ana weren’t the only people who surprised everyone and got together after Christmas. In what our class now refers to as The Great Hormone Explosion of 2016, suddenly there were more or less eight couples in a class of 36. Everyone had someone. And the people who didn’t probably weren’t the type of people to listen to Use Somebody by Kings of Leon on late night car rides and cry fat, ugly tears. Towards the end of the school year, our entire class went on this overnight marine biology field trip. After dinner, everyone went out to the dock overlooking the sea. All the couples had their own little spots, and they were loving it up in the most PG ways they could, and it was the cutest thing ever. I was on a beach table, doing homework that was due a week later. Writing this down now, it sounds incredibly sad. But I was so busy girlbossing, as the youth of today might say, that I forgot to be sad.
This story ends the way the Boston Marathon of 1980 ended. A random marathoner is mere inches away from winning the Boston Marathon, when all of a sudden, Rosie Ruiz jumps out of a nearby bush, steals their final lap, and wins the whole thing. The unassuming marathoner represents me, and Rosie Ruiz represents the massive reality check that slapped me across the face. I thought that if I worked hard enough, I would end that nightmare of a year with a body I would gladly buy a bikini for. That boys would like me more, for my newly massive breasts and my newly found confidence brought about by my newly massive breasts. That my hands could start drawing in different shapes again. But I guess some divine being was fed up at this point and sent help over, because I finally understood. Every time I came home for the weekend, my mother would sit by my bed and massage my back until I fell asleep. Her lines and swirls and hearts and curves — — they made me feel good. They made me feel good because they were moving with love. But I had no love for the body I would bruise and beat under a blanket, before the sky became the sun.
*
I exited the ‘Safe, Easy, Natural Techniques That Will Make Your Breasts Look Bigger’ tab just as that year ended. And three years after, at seventeen, I tried to put the whole experience into writing for the first time. I even submitted it to my 12th grade English teacher. At the end of that very first version, I wrote:
Self-love isn’t something I can create a problem-solution outline for. The journey isn’t a journey at all. It’s a never ending ordeal of switching back and forth between feeling cute after a game of basketball and going on a juice cleanse to lose weight. Between looking through lipstick shades in the drugstore and wondering if makeup makes me look like I’m trying too hard and doing double chin-thinning exercises before I sleep at night (when will I realise these things never work). Between finally learning how to smile in pictures and thinking I should be less concerned about my forehead acne and more concerned about important things like the death of the Great Barrier Reef.
But also realizing my heart is young enough to still beat for all of these things.
Today, I’m 20 years old. Brad and Ana went their separate ways, and I found my way back to the both of them, too. Ana is a friend, and Brad is an even better friend. We drink and party and laugh about old times.
It’s also 2022, and the entire world is stuck in a global pandemic that doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon. Life sucks. I’ve been robbed of the opportunity to have a college hoe phase, I’ve tried and failed several times to launch an internet love off the ground, I’ve consistently committed the mortal sin of moving my Bumble conversations over to Instagram, and now I have roughly a dozen ghosted matches just lingering on my account, transcending time and space. Most days, I don’t like the way my face looks. I don’t like the way my body feels. Maybe my boob massaging days don’t feel nearly as strange when I have, more than once, laid in bed pondering over whether my thirst trap photos would get viewed more at 9 PM or at 10 PM.
And so one thing is clear: all these years later, self love is still such a precarious thing. Sometimes, I look at my boobs now (yes, they eventually caught up) and think I’m the hottest person on Planet Earth. Other times, I’ll watch a dozen mukbang videos to feed myself vicariously through them instead of actually eating in real life. I feel strong after a run, I feel happy under the sun, I feel shitty in most of the jeans I own, I feel almost certain I’m never going to find love and I’m going to die alone.
But who knows? Between next week, next Halloween, or the year 2035, things might be completely different. I might finally get out of talking stage purgatory and meet the person of my dreams. I might pick up a plethora of super niche and unexpected hobbies, like rug punching or wax stamp making, and just feel so preoccupied by all of them that I would hardly have time for even the occasional intrusive thought. And I might take big steps towards a new life, so big that I’ll have to leave other lives behind. I might leave fourteen year old me right here — everything that’s been said about her and to her, everything she’s said about and to herself — and never unearth her again, not even to be funny. And I’ll find new things to laugh about, where for once, the joke’s not on me.
