Why I Got Breast Implants

After a lifetime of looking good for other people, I needed to reclaim my body

Photos courtesy of the author.

In September 2018, I got my breast implants explanted.

The surgery was simple. Dr. C. made two-inch-long incisions and extracted a pair of saline water balloons from the exhausted skin sacks where they’d spent the previous 13 years. One moment they were inside of my body, and the next they were at the bottom of a red biohazard trash can in the corner of the room — where they belonged.

Physically, all the removal required was showing up, $2,000, 1 milligram of Valium, and my love at my side, holding my hand.

Mentally, it was vastly more complicated, and I had to dig deep to tunnel safely through to the other side.

I realized that I couldn’t understand how to move forward without exploring the question, “Why the fuck did I get them in the first place?” I wonder if any of us, in the moment we make the choice, really knows. I definitely didn’t.

The first time my boobs changed my life

As a newly minted teenager, my breasts changed my life’s trajectory. They weren’t the whole of the shift, but they were a substantial part of it. The life I knew before my breasts developed and the life I lived afterward bore no resemblance to each other. Both lives were real, but neither was whole or true.

Growing up, I was an outcast — a pariah. I was skinny and awkward, ill-groomed, and unaware of the social norms everyone else seemed to intuitively understand. The things that made me exceptional were also things that painted a blood-red target on my back.

Me at 12 years old.

And my classmates rarely passed up an opportunity to take a shot.

I was desperate for connection and tried so hard to fit in, but my clumsy attempts to assimilate were ridiculed. I was poor and shabby, and when I opened my mouth, more often than not, I shoved in both feet. I fixated on random shit, like the spelling bee and gymnastics, and only talked about myself and my interests. I didn’t know how to talk about anything else.

And for that, I suffered. I was crazy smart and devastatingly ignorant at the same time.

Fast forward five years and puberty gifted me nine inches of height, delicate bone structure, and giant boobs.

The dads called me, “The One with the Body.”

Everything about me was exaggerated in seemingly just the right way. I grew 34D breasts that were grossly disproportionate and impossible to ignore on my skinny 6-foot-1-inch, 135-pound frame. And I did not see that shit coming. The U-turn damn near gave me whiplash. It was as if I woke up on the day I turned 15 in an alternate dimension.

At 15, I looked very different than at 12.

In this new world, I was a varsity cheerleader and varsity volleyball starter. I got invited to the cool parties. I dated the cute, popular boys. I was “discovered” by my modeling agency walking with my friends through my shopping mall. The dads called me, “The One with the Body.”

I garnered a lot of attention, so much so that there were times it felt unsafe. When I needed to leave the house in those moments, I would hide in baggy clothes, no makeup, and a ballcap.

The catalyst for the change in my social status, and thus my entire life, was my physical appearance. I was still the same socially awkward weirdo on the inside. I just grew taller, stayed skinny, and grew boobs.

The world rearranged itself around me, and attention, accolades, and opportunities dropped at my feet because of my appearance. It seemed that all of my problems with external acceptance were solved.

My new silhouette brought a new set of problems for which I was even less prepared.

Someone who couldn’t leave me

Six years later, I became a 21-year-old bride on my honeymoon with my new 25-year-old groom.

Throughout our marriage, my ex regularly cited that trip as one of the happiest experiences we ever shared. When he said it — and he said it a lot — I always smiled and nodded, never giving voice to my opposition. There was no point.

I still can’t imagine what he remembers as happy. For me, the trip was foreboding.

I didn’t know him. We had gotten engaged after six weeks of dating, the summer before my senior year of college, and I was so happy to be getting married I’m not sure that I cared much about to whom. Getting married meant I’d have someone who could never leave me.

The hustle required over the next year to finish my undergraduate degree, grieve my seven-month-old birth daughter, whom I had recently given up for adoption, and plan my wedding so that I could get married 10 days after graduation didn’t leave me much time or energy to learn more about the man to whom I was committing my life.

I figured we had the next 60 years together on the horizon, and there was plenty of time for discovery.

I wanted so badly to be the last couple standing during the anniversary dance at my grandchild’s wedding — the two who kept on dancing when the DJ said, “Okay! You gotta go unless you’ve been married at least 50 years!” I’d hold my beloved’s hand, and we’d sway, forehead-to-wrinkled forehead, the glow of the life we’d built together — brick by brick, year by year — radiating through the room.

And I thought I knew enough about him to look forward to it. But on my honeymoon, I got a crash course in my new husband that left me less than excited about what was to come.

I learned so much on that trip.

First, I learned to stay quiet and passively agree at check-in to switch rooms to one that had a better view than the suite included in our honeymoon package. The only downside was that it had two full beds instead of a king.

His justifications of, “We can’t pass it up! That view is like $300 more per night” and “Isn’t it nice to be able to stretch out?” and “We didn’t come all the way to the ocean to not see the ocean” sounded reasonable enough through the filter of my budding resentment.

I learned to shut down the part of me that had hoped to hear, “No thanks on the ‘upgrade.’ You can throw a mattress out on the courtyard for all I care. She’s the only view I’m interested in.”

On day one of our honeymoon.

I learned I could expect impatient sarcasm and not-so-passive, but definitely aggressive digs when I communicated that the idea of traversing a foreign jungle with a man who reacted with disgust at my expressions of fear didn’t feel safe.

I learned the extent of his willingness to leave without me when his eye rolls and exasperated sighs didn’t quell my fears.

I imagined a week-long sex-fest where we worshiped each other’s bodies, bonded as a newly minted pair, and rarely bothered with clothes or even leaving the room.

The sense of safety I thought would come when he slid that ring on my finger was revealing itself to be a delusion. I felt less safe instead of more. And I absorbed all of his tiny blows to keep the peace.

His annoyance was justified, I thought, and the discord was my fault for expecting that our honeymoon would be “eat, sleep, fuck, repeat” instead of “Do you think we can squeeze the jungle walk and the Mayan ruin tour into the same day?”

I imagined a weeklong sex fest where we worshiped each other’s bodies, bonded as a newly minted pair, and rarely bothered with clothes or even leaving the room.

I hadn’t anticipated spending every day on excursions. We should’ve talked about it beforehand, and I could’ve told him what I wanted. It was my fault. Which meant I told myself I could fix it.

“Just try, AJ. Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.

The first day of trying to “just try” consisted of accompanying him snorkeling, which resulted in a fight and being left to my own devices to manage a panic attack while he swam downstream, out of sight. I spent the remaining days of our honeymoon resigned to the fact that this trip wasn’t about us. It was about him doing things he wanted to do, and I could come along or not.

Most often, I chose not.

He took this picture of me standing on the shore on the day I went with him. He said he took it so that I could see how “silly” I looked when I wouldn’t go in. I wandered around for two hours waiting for him to reappear.

One afternoon, toward the end of our weeklong trip, he returned to the hotel room following whatever activity he had undertaken that day and got straight into the shower. He had a habit of taking at least one hourlong shower per day, which I had recently discovered was an excuse for an extended jerk-off session. I ignored it because, on some level, his well-practiced ability to satisfy himself suddenly worked for me.

I knew I would be alone for a while while he fucked other women in his mind and spilled the baby I wanted onto the shower floor. It was okay because I had a hunch that baby was already in my belly. And she was. Thank God.

My ex was fiercely territorial about my body. He wouldn’t get upset (at least not visibly) when men looked at me, but he would rage when he believed that I was “showing off.”

I talked myself into being flattered by his possessiveness.

He knew I had well-seasoned sexual past — partly from the traditional “getting to know you” dating conversations and partly from my exhibition of the kind of high-level sexual proficiency gained only through enthusiastic and committed study. But he had an aversion to any open discussion of it. He wanted to believe that my past didn’t exist, and that no other man had touched my body.

He needed to believe it.

He didn’t know how many men I’d slept with. He didn’t acknowledge I had been raped. I tried to tell him once through tears and he stopped me, saying he couldn’t handle hearing it. At the time, I thought he struggled because he didn’t want to imagine me hurting. It took me a while to figure out that his discomfort was about his aversion to the idea of other men having helped themselves to my body.

And so he showered with the door locked while I read my book on our balcony.

From that coveted, two-bed, partial-ocean view suite balcony on the third floor, I watched people lying on the beach and strolling through the sand. The resort allowed topless bathing, and, for days, I had been surrounded by women who seemed devoid of self-consciousness as they walked by with their breasts exposed, free, and beautiful in every imperfect iteration. I was so hypercritical of my body that I couldn’t imagine having that kind of confidence, and my breasts were a particular source of anxiety.

My new husband would stare at every one of those women — studying — and when a pair displeased him, he’d scoff and say something like, “She should put her top back on.”

I felt my body, my loyalty, my intentions, and my past shamed with that one comment.

I asked him at one point after he managed to peel his gaze from a particularly alluring pair of breasts, if he would like it if I took my top off, too. He seemed to enjoy it when other women did. And I knew from his porn selection that he was a boob guy.

Maybe if I bared my breasts, too, he’d want to sleep in bed with me.

I was hypercritical of my breasts then, but I would’ve gone topless to please him.

“Are you fucking kidding me, AJ? I thought you were ‘self-conscious!?’” he replied with the sarcastic flourish of air quotes. “We’ve been married for five days, and you’re already dying to show off your tits to other men? I should’ve known.”

I felt my body, my loyalty, my intentions, and my past shamed with that one comment.

He snatched up his sandals and towel and stormed back to the room. I stayed poolside for another hour, waiting for my eyes to stop welling up so I could go back to our suite and apologize without my voice cracking.

Back on the balcony, with my new husband in the shower — occupied with thoughts of cumming on someone else’s tits — an impulse overcame me.

In an experiment that was part defiance and part curiosity, I reached behind my neck and tugged on the string of my pale blue triangle bikini top. I felt it loosen. I pulled harder and released the bow I had tied… and hesitated for just a moment before letting my top fall to the floor.

I stood there, feeling the sunshine touch the skin on my chest for the first time in my adult life, and I closed my eyes to both revel in the moment and hide behind my eyelids. I half-believed that I would open them to a crowd of people gathered around to gawk at the horribleness of my breasts.

They might even yell at me to put my shirt back on.

When I opened my eyes, the world was somehow still turning. And I just stood there.

People looked up from below, ran their eyes over my figure, smiled if they happened to catch my eye, and continued on their way. They didn’t recoil in disgust. They didn’t laugh at (what I perceived as) my misshapen breasts. They didn’t think much at all. I was just another woman occupying the body God gave me, without shame or fear, amongst other people doing the same, unremarkable thing.

I felt liberated. Free. Beautifully, imperfectly, reverently human. And safe.

The slam of the shower door closing behind my husband snapped me back to reality, and I scrambled to get my top back on, shuffle inside, flop on my bed, and pretend to be asleep just as I heard the click of the lock and the bathroom door creak open.

It was a run-in with self-acceptance and a moment of respite from chronic anxiety and self-loathing. That was the happiest moment of my honeymoon — just me, topless on my balcony. And its conclusion foreshadowed the next 16 years of my life.

Eight months later, my breasts were pressed into service by the birth of my daughter. They were now utilitarian laborers. They were no longer the object of unfettered attention from male passersby. My body changed, by design, to meet the needs of my daughter. I was still objectively attractive, but bodies change with pregnancy and childbirth in ways that cannot be undone.

It was a rough transition for a woman who had lived the first half of her life, getting her emotional needs met by representing an ideal of youth and beauty.

Changing myself into something loveable

The kind of about-face I experienced in adolescence doesn’t happen without consequences. “Rags-to-riches” lottery winners eventually end up back in their rags.

This much I know: I entered puberty feeling like an unloveable, worthless piece of shit. When I hit the genetic lottery, I held on to that winning ticket like grim death.

As my life changed for the better, I intuitively realized how much I had to lose and how fragile my grip on it was. There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t have done to preserve the attention I read as love.

I had spent my early years in the rags of social isolation, and I didn’t want to wear them ever again.

I was 15 the first day I opened the refrigerator after school and thought, “Maybe I’ll see what happens if I don’t eat for the rest of the night.” And it felt so good that the next morning, I thought, “I wonder if I can make it through the school day with just gum.”

I did.

Restricting what I ate gave me a sense of control over my fear of disappearing. As long as I didn’t gain weight, I’d have some clout. If I looked like a model, there’d always be people who wanted to be around me and plenty of boys to make me feel wanted — at least until they got to know the “real me.”

My brain created a filter for me to view myself. It was a not-so-fun house mirror that added 10, 15, 20 pounds to my reflection. The distortion ensured that I wouldn’t lose self-control — that I wouldn’t slip and indulge myself and cost me the attention I knew I didn’t deserve anyway.

Everything and everyone in my life was both a gift and a threat to me. I had an overwhelming fear of loss. Without the attention my body garnered, I imagined I’d return to being rejected and lonely. With it, I was overwhelmed by the reality that peoples’ interest in me had nothing to do with the person inside… and I was still lonely.

Eleven years later, and out of fear of losing everything I had gained since my metamorphosis, I would get breast implants to try to claw some of that external validation back.

My brain still had it all wrong.

I had the first symptom of my breast implant illness — anorexia — at 15.