I’m sweating all over my yoga mat. The thick kind because the thin ones fuck with my knees. I’m working out because if I don’t work out I will forget that life is indeed worth living. I’m sweating even though I’m mostly naked and I’m wearing my little Alo sports bra because the boob job allows me to wear little sports bras now. I’m jumping—literally jumping—because jumping is fantastic for my lymphatic system and I am simply a body full of organs that need twisting, squeezing, and jostling to be reminded to work. They, the organs, (I) will work without tending to a point because no matter how appealing death seems, my body still wants to keep me alive. So I am sweating to stay alive. Slippery and slick, with limbs flailing, and my new little titties bouncing, unlike my old, massive honkers which would’ve laughed at the thought of doing jumping jacks.
My old lover, who had perfect, god-given little titties, attended the gym like it was church. She wished the e-girls knew that working out would make them less depressed. I hated working out with her—she was so disciplined and prideful. I was like a sack of water balloons spilling and falling compared to her tautness and firmness. I decided I wasn’t the kind of person who worked out because she was the kind of person who worked out. I was the kind of person who was nice to cuddle with.
My old lover, who takes on a certain meaning when I address her as such, was only my lover for a short time. We U-Hauled anyway, as lesbians do, even though I have never felt at home with the lesbian identity nor any other identifier. About 20% of me feels at home with the term “lesbian,” so, when we were briefly lovers, the term felt apt. I know this is the paradox of claiming identity: at once you are given a home through a name but the gift requires a variety of renouncements.
My old lover and I moved in together once we decided to be just friends, but of course, we could never just be friends. The enmeshment, jealousy, and possessiveness that seem to arrive post-sex already stained our dynamic. We might not have been actively sleeping together, but the way I cooked for her and the way she cleaned our apartment felt otherwise. It was horrible watching ourselves constantly bump up against our internalized misogyny. How predictable! Our competition was constantly on a slow simmer. Neither of us knew how not to compare ourselves, how not to size up each other, each outfit, each new lover. I remember telling her one day, after months of self-conscious deliberation, that I wanted a binder. Me too, she said. I wanted to shove her. A binder on her little titties felt unfair.
This is my affliction and my solution, I wanted to shout.
I maybe could have handled girlhood if the breasts didn’t come like they did. They appeared and refused to stop appearing. As my body changed from child-body into woman-body, there seemed to be no question that I was anything other than a mother-to-be with my sturdy, fertile, Strega-Nona build. I shifted and stumbled between hypervisibility and hiding, accumulating a confusing desire for small titties in each mode. It’s a very classic queer debacle: do I want to be them or do I want to fuck them? The answer is usually: yes. If I cannot be them, and no amount of praying will make me become them, then maybe I can be with them. Fucking is perhaps the closest I will ever get to becoming someone else, besides birthing or being birthed. Then there’s surgery.
I believe that transition is as emotional, internal, and spiritual as it is hormonal or surgical. Akin to the chicken-or-the-egg debacle, does being trans come before the surgery? Do the hormones make me trans? Or maybe more analogous to if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest-and-no-one-can-tell-what-my-identity-is… do I care? Is it a mistake if I continue to hate myself but in an utterly new way? Why can’t surgery fix it all? My friends were always making more room for me to come out than I was ready for. I would confirm their visions and expectations months or years later, always with my tail between my legs: turns out you were right, is it okay to get this surgery? Is it okay if mine is different?
I love referring to my surgery as a boob job because it makes people do a double-take. I see them recalibrate, “What kind of gay are you? Where are you coming from and where are you going?” I love saying top surgery, breast reduction, and boob job because all are true. Before surgery, the breasts were an exhausting marker. Lovers and friends alike were drawn to me–or my breasts–like moths to a mother-flame, as if I could nurse them and care for each of them in the psychosexual ways they yearned for. One lover was obsessed with the fantasy of impregnating me. The longer I witnessed what the world wanted from me, and how my body was treated like a vessel, the more I felt like the massive honkers were never mine to begin with.
Salvation is defined as preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss. When I declare that my little titties saved my life, I am not exaggerating. Before surgery, working out, getting dressed, being perceived, and ~simply existing~ was an impossibly charged event. To be embodied was more difficult than grounding. The benefits of sweating and stretching were often marred by the unnerving chaos of dysphoria. I used to think I had to love myself out of the desire for body modification. As if my yearnings were just the product of internalized misogyny–and I, a fool slobbering over a problem and solution that capitalism procured. But having little titties makes me want to die less, or rather, the boob job shifted the death urge off of my body. Now I can hold it, tend to it. And my little titties look so cute in a little sports bra.