Less Human

Two days before my sister’s wedding, I sat on an exercise ball in her living room while she laughed at me.

I melted into the ball, having given up at even the concept of balance.

“Ugh. This thing is not meant for people with boobs, is it?” I said.

“No. I hate having big boobs.”

Boobs were a subject of many conversations with my female friends, but never one with my sister. Despite the drastic visual distinction between ours, Valerie and I never discussed bodies. It was new territory for us, one in which she complained about the grapefruits on her chest—a new topography for her. I’d been carrying my own, larger chest, for nearly twice as long.

“I don’t know if you remember,” she said, “I used to be thin.”

It was like the shock of your first bee sting, the sudden pain and flash of terror that you might be allergic.

Thin: A canyon of an understatement.

My sister had been skeletal.

A ribcage.

A muscle slab.

Ten years of denial in four letters.

Almost a decade after her recovery and Valerie still hated her body. I had felt for so long like I couldn’t hate my own—I wasn’t allowed.

My plastic surgeon’s office is self-aware. It knows why I have driven an hour and a half to be here, inside a Colonial-inspired brick expanse in Babylon, New York. The office lobby is gaudy and surface-deep, remodeled with cherry cabinets and faux-crystal knobs. A thirteen-foot square Persian rug colonizes the tile floor. Its edges are lined with antique dining chairs, all sheathed in plastic. A massive wooden pedestal table looms in the center of the room. It is also protected in plastic. I use it to complete my intake forms and the staff warn me to be careful not to press too hard—it might wobble. In a gentle pen stroke, I sign parts of myself away.

I have come here, to a city named for sin and lavishness, to be remodeled. I have come here to betray my body.

–

I learned what a breast reduction was in seventh grade when my Girl Scout leader had one. I stored the idea in my body, like a squirrel hoards acorns knowing it will need them someday. But for more than a decade, the reality of it felt unattainable. I don’t have health insurance, I said. I can’t afford it, I said. I don’t need really need one, I said.

I never said I was ashamed, although that was the real obstacle—one so deeply internal, it may have been hidden even to me, obstructed from my consciousness by size 36H breasts. I was ashamed of their obtrusive existence. I was afraid they wouldn’t be any different, that it wouldn’t matter. And I worried about what it would mean to want them gone.

Every time I scratched at the possibility, I left the same, unanswerable wound: how can I love myself if I want to change who I am?

–

Joan’s apartment was an undecorated one bedroom in Kingsland, New York. I felt at home there, visiting my friend’s mother, sans friend, over Labor Day weekend.

Joan is unpretentious. A retired microbiology professor who moved from Montana to be closer to her only child, she lives off of lean cuisines and spends her days with a tiny dog.

I stayed with her for three days, playing scrabble and visiting historical landmarks.

“This is Maryann. She’s my surrogate daughter,” Joan would say when we ran into her neighbors.

Maybe it was that my body was already standing in place for something else that made me more receptive to the idea. Or maybe it was that in her presence, I felt safe wanting. A quiet life alone, admittedly enjoying the taste and ease of lean cuisines—Joan was not ashamed of existing.

Over our many meals that weekend, we talked about serious things—the kind of conversations I’d always wanted to have with my family but couldn’t. My own parents and siblings have long been separated by distance and silence, all of us living quietly in shame. All of us, at one point or another, at odds with our bodies.

Joan and I talked a lot about bodies—our own, but also those that had bruised us.

She told me she’d had a breast reduction twenty years before.

“My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. I didn’t even have back pain. I just didn’t want them. And, you will have scars. But it’s not like that matters.”

“You’re not sending nudes to all your boyfriends, Joan?”

“Ha. Honestly, Maryann, men are clueless.”

“Yeah I guess it’s not like you get naked and they say ‘on second thought…’”

“They don’t care.”

But I do.

–

I have no new perspective to offer when I say that most women learn to exist as contradictions. We’re taught to hate our bodies yet accept them. And, if we choose to change them, we must accept the ridicule.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t ready to change my breasts. I was never ready to admit I wanted to change them. No matter how ashamed I am of my body, I will always be more ashamed of my lack of self-acceptance.

Joan’s endorsement was the final stitch. She sealed me into a decision, like the spring of a diving board as you bend your legs to jump. I had finally chosen to live in the contradiction and pursue a breast reduction. I decided it is possible to love yourself and still want to be someone else.

–

I found out my sister was undertaking the same surgery. And she’d scheduled it two weeks before mine. Neither of us had any idea. It happened to my brothers, too. One got engaged in Philadelphia within the hour the other eloped in California. Neither had any idea. Despite our distance, and our accepted silence, my siblings and I exist in parallel as perpetual competitors. We are unknowingly aligned, racing toward the end of something. We steal each other’s spotlights by coincidence.

Thousands of miles apart, underneath our implicit silence, Valerie and I had chosen to remove the same pieces of ourselves. I was heartbroken that my sister had outpaced me. In part because she could still so easily manipulate her body and in part because I’d suffered longer. She’d had an eating disorder most of my childhood, whereas I carried the breasts for both of us.

She’s not entitled to this.

Valerie spent so long controlling her body—I’d finally made the step to change mine, to shed weight.

I’ve learned that people can exist in parallel without always being in contention. But there I was, feeling trivialized again. I’ve spoken about how one woman’s sexual assault doesn’t make another’s invalid. That the forces that act upon us act upon all of us. My sister’s struggle with her body was my struggle with my body. But I will always feel dwarfed by her. Despite the guarded hopelessness in every conversation, despite her life’s opposite trajectory, she can still take from me.

She’s not entitled to this.

–

When I arrive at the hospital, the woman checking me in gives me a wristband and asks

me to say and spell my name.

She brings me to an office where another woman takes my $20 copay for a $100,000 surgical procedure. I sign some forms. She asks me to say and spell my name. 

I sit in the waiting area and four minutes later a nurse brings me to a room with a reclining chair and a curtain. She gives me a gown and slipper socks. They are the saddest shade of beige. She leaves, and I undress and re-dress and sit down and read a book.

Another nurse comes in and asks me about allergies and anesthesia. She asks me to say and spell my name.

Say and spell your name. Say and spell your name. Say and spell your name.

It feels like I am proving my own identity, being prodded into changing my mind.

Yes! I am Maryann! And I will not cut into my flesh to remove the parts of me I never wanted!

–

My sister skipped her teenage years and my own childhood bypassed me without my being aware it was taken away. She missed the time that girls become women—a delayed adulthood. I missed the part where girls stay girls and plowed through to an early maturity. My sister and I were ill-fit from the beginning.

By sixth grade, I got my first period—a month before my 12^th birthday. My breasts belonged to someone much older, someone who knew how to wield them in a way I never would. A boy once asked me if I stuffed my bra. I told him I didn’t. But I didn’t tell him that I would have done anything for them to go away. If only not acknowledging them could have wiped away their existence. If only silence was also blind.

I’ve lived with my body, never succeeding in changing it beyond the few pounds that shift into the air when I first wake up. I could never alter it because I couldn’t admit that I wanted to. Valerie was supposed to live with it longer. She needed to know what it felt like to be catcalled, to feel the wild bounce of hefty breasts down a staircase.

In my adulthood, I was always surprised by the protrusions in my reflection. They were foreign orbs I’d learned to tolerate, but they never really belonged there. My oversized breasts were caricatures of womanhood. They incited whistles and glances and men groping me in an above-ground pool. I think sometimes I tried to use them as a barrier, to convince myself I was so grotesque no one would want me, and I could live quietly behind them, undisturbed.

I worry about my body belonging to someone else, but I’m not sure it’s ever been mine.

I am not entitled to this.

–

After months of consultations, documentation of back pain, spinal x-rays, an MRI, doctors’ letters confirming that I would need enough of me removed to qualify as reconstructive surgery, my doctor’s office submitted an insurance claim. I was approved in a day.

Two weeks later, I was in an O.R., starving in order to prevent myself from dying. A morsel of food could have killed me; a fleck caught in my throat could have choked me while unconscious.

Valerie’s insurance denied her, twice. She and her husband paid for it—a tenth of the cost my insurance would eventually be charged. It was a tiny victory, but what did it matter when I was willingly cutting myself open, volunteering for a major surgery.  Once you’ve turned to dangerous and artificial solutions, once you’ve chosen personal acceptance despite the process, you realize victory is not over anyone. My sister and I have been running in separate races, pursued by our respective ghosts.

Valerie would have had to withhold food and water the day before her surgery. She would have had to face her addiction in an entirely different way than I did. I was outrunning the confines I thought her eating disorder imposed on my choices as a woman. She was confronting her entire self.

–

When waking from anesthesia, you are in second person. In the present and yet without time. Between self and world. You become extraterrestrial. Everything is new. The world is smudged from your drowsiness and blurred without your glasses. You are without a body momentarily, as your fingers re-find their tips and your neck rediscovers its twist.

Your surgeon stops in to show you your new breasts. It’s hard to know if these are really new or if they were merely lost in the reality gap you’ve fallen into. You almost cry because you think they are beautiful, but without your glasses, it’s hard to tell, even three inches in front of you.

Later, you drink the best apple juice you’ve ever had. The woman you can’t see through the curtain on your right thinks so, too. Because every apple juice is the best apple juice you’ve ever had when you haven’t eaten in 36 hours.

Your friend arrives to take you home. You recognize her walk, her hair, her shape. She is human, here to introduce you to all that you knew. Her coat, her curves, her unbridled tresses—they comfort you. The lines of her confine you once again into reality.

–

My throat was dry from intubation, but I tried to shout to her anyway as my friend strode into the recovery ward to rescue me.

“Amanda! I could tell it was you by your shape.”

“Yes, my shape.” She laughed.

“I can’t see without my glasses.”

“Do you want them?”

“Yes. My glasses. They’re in my bag.”

Amanda had to ask the nurse for my bag, which I had packed with a book and extra clothing for fear I would bleed. She dug through my anxiety and retrieved my glasses. The world was defined again.

“When I woke up, I was convinced I was still in surgery.”

“That sounds terrifying.”

“And then I was shivering. And I said I was in pain. And they asked on a scale of one to ten. I said 7. But I think it was 10.”

“Are you still in pain?”

“No. But why did I do that? I was afraid they wouldn’t believe me or something.”

“Yeah, I do that too. You didn’t want to exaggerate.”

I had become smaller. Perhaps my pain had, too.

She stepped away to go to the bathroom and I ate applesauce, the friendly cousin of my beloved juice. I had reverted to my younger self, the person before puberty, before all this.

“As I came out of the bathroom,” Amanda started, “I saw an entire fridge full of applesauce. It was amazing.”

“Did you steal me some?”

“I’m sure you can have more applesauce if you ask.” She got the nurse’s attention and asked her for more applesauce.

The last patient in the recovery room, hours after the hospital had closed for the day, I stood to leave.

“Wow,” Amanda said, “I can already see the difference. Do you notice it?”

I caught a glimpse in the window, my glasses reflected in the pane—this was reality.

“Yeah,” I said, “I can’t believe it.”

“I didn’t think it’d be so obvious right away.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

I had a new shape.

I couldn’t raise my arms above my head. I couldn’t hold my bag. I had to leave in a wheelchair. They treated me like I was sick, like I hadn’t willfully pursued this. It was instinct to grab my bag, to carry myself. But Amanda took my bag and the nurses helped me into a wheelchair. It was the same delicacy with which Valerie had been treated for most of my youth. The kind of archetypal female helplessness I wanted to exude, but couldn’t admit I wanted to exude.

–

My sister has always been the scapegoat for my shame. She was a visible target. A sharp-edged opposite, the epitome of what I was not allowed to be. I can begin to empathize with Valerie, to understand the power in re-shaping yourself and the guilt it can foster in you.

The difference between the self I always imagined and the self I never accepted was 1,179 grams of breast fat. It’s an easy metaphor: a spiritual transformation through a physical one. A surgeon removed two-and-a-half pounds from my chest, and I woke up as the person I always wanted to be.

In five unconscious hours, I became myself.

The decision to excavate myself was entirely mine, although I’m sure it was subconsciously motivated by anger: 537 grams from my right breast, 642 from my left, substantial portions of my femininity removed—my sister and my shame gone.

Now, I have scars. Red ridges under my breasts, faint puckers around the brown of my areolas, lines straight down. T-scars.

I’ve added corners to myself.

I was afraid they might feel like a scarlet letter. How would I explain them to a new sexual partner? Despite Joan’s reassurance, I was nervous they would be wrongly understood. They were battle wounds of choice. I didn’t deserve sympathy. I did not survive anything.

But when I looked in the mirror in the days after surgery—which I did constantly—I saw what I’d always thought I looked like. I’d never felt as complete, even with something missing from me. Even with the scars, the permanent stamps of my past self-disapproval, I was in love with my body for the first time. I was in love with my contradiction.

–

As I unwrap my bandages two days after surgery, I convulse with fear. Each tug at the blood-blotted gauze feels as though my body is giving out. I panic that I will tear a wound open and my insides will tumble onto the bright tile floor. Gently, I pull at the strips, certain the next millimeter will rip out my nipple. I stop every few minutes and sit on the floor, spinning with regret, pulsing with the thought that a team of near strangers, some even faceless beyond my blurred, contactless vision, knew my body more intimately that even I ever could.

I want to call someone to do this for me—I can’t tear my own body apart. Any friend will come and willingly un-bandage my naked self, but even in my lightheaded stupor I know it has to be me. I’ve done this to my body; I have to be the one to rediscover it.

Rip by rip, over a painstaking forty minutes, I remove the gauze around my breasts until I see them: yellow and blue and square. They are perfect. The kind of perfect that silences the world, like living inside your own rainbow.

In my reflection, I notice bruises on my back like fingerprints, the touch of a ghost, a former self saying goodbye.

I am less human now. But I am more me.

________

Maryann Aita is a writer and performer in Brooklyn, New York. Her nonfiction is in The Porterhouse Review, The Exposition Review, Crack the Spine, Big Muddy, and other journals. She performs around New York City and her one-woman show was featured at The People’s Improv Theater. Maryann has a BA from NYU and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Williamsburg with two cats. You can find more about her at http://maryannaita.com.