Getting the Weight Off My Chest

I have big boobs, but a little over a year ago I had BIG BOOBS. I was in the 8th grade when I got to the point where without a bra, I was in absolute agony and holding my arms tightly over my chest all day. And they only got larger from there. I wore a size C bra until I was a junior in high school, and it took an entire day to find a store that could measure me appropriately. My life up until a year ago was horrific when it came to anything that was going to be covering my chest: bras, bikini tops, t-shirts, button up shirts. Nothing fit correctly.

I assume at this point you’re asking for just a *crumb* of context, wondering, “How big were you? It couldn’t have been that bad…” and “Dating must have been easy! Guys must have been all over you, right?” Well, it’s these assumptions I’ve come to put in the same dumpster as my titties before I set it on fire.

First of all, let’s explain how big I was versus how big I am now.

I recently discovered a boob-to-pancake batter calculator, so we’re going to do it that way.

From the age of 13 to 25, I was carrying around the equivalent of 86 pancakes on my chest every day. Can you even fathom that many pancakes? I know I can’t. Now imagine, a young teenager, only five foot three inches, stumbling around the halls of junior high, with all of those hormones and angst and cringe… but now she’s carrying 86 pancakes worth of batter in a fanny pack. Not only does that sound horrifically embarrassing, but it’s just down-right cumbersome.

I’m now only carrying around a svelte 86 pancakes, which an adult body can carry better than young teen. It’s still way too many pancakes, but it is infinitely more manageable.

Here’s the chart so you can find out the grotesque amount of pancakes you carry around daily:

You would think that any well-meaning adult would want a young child to carry around an appropriate amount of pancakes, right? Wrong. I can’t tell you how many GROWN ASS WOMEN would tell me, “Oh, people pay good money for what you have!” or, “At least let them catch you a man first” or, “You’re so lucky; I wish I had boobs, but I’m so flat!”

I was literally a child, wearing ill-fitting bras that hurt me and left scars on my torso, or I was spending a whole measly Pizza Hut paycheck on a $66 bra, because at the time, there were no cheap options for people like me. I had to special-order my bikini tops from Britain. I longed to shop in the bra section at Kohl’s, but I had to trek my ass thirty mins away to the FancyPants Mall in Richpeoplestan to go to a freakin’ Nordstrom’s in order to buy something that would only scar me a little bit.

While my friends got to buy phones and video games and eat out after school everyday, I was saving money so I could have a backup bra for when mine wore out because my bra was carrying around 86 sweaty pancakes incased in meat sacks everyday. I wore a sports bra to bed at night because if I didn’t I WOULD SAG. I was 16 and if I didn’t wear a bra 24/7 I would look like a 68-year-old who burned her bra in the 70’s and didn’t care that her nips touched her knees.

But as a 16-year-old I cared quite a bit, if you can imagine. Not to mention, if I went bra-less and had to walk up stairs or move any faster than a walk… my boobs would cause black eyes for everyone in the tristate area.

This also made dress shopping an actual nightmare. I wanted to wear cute dresses that were strapless, or had fun open backs, or literally anything other than a tank top with thick straps, but it was not to be. I wore the same style of dress to everything, and while I still looked cute, I missed out on all the sassy clothes only teens can pull off.

In the picture below, where I’m in the car, notice the rut in my shoulder from the plastic clear strap of the bra I was wearing, which was four cup-sizes too small for me. I adopted the pin-up girl look, because those A-line designs were the only thing that didn’t make me look like a boob with legs. In the rock climbing picture, I’m wearing a bra that fits, but you can still see just how aggressive those things were on my chest. It honestly probably made my rock climber’s shoulder worse than it would have been. The last photo is of one of my many underwire scars from the night before my surgery.

. . .

The worst thing about having big boobs, for me at least, was how difficult they made it for me to do the things I loved to do.

I stopped riding horses and rock climbing. Rock climbing had extra challenges because my torso was three inches farther from the rock face than everyone else’s. Paired with the fact that I’m so short, it was kind of a wonder I was able to climb up to 5.10 when I was climbing regularly.

I didn’t realize how much I loved to be outside and active until after I had four pounds of tissue removed from my chest. Four pounds of pressure on my upper back that I no longer had to deal with– four pounds lighter to move around with more ease, and probably two inches slimmer in my chest. Clothes aren’t a pain in the ass anymore, at least no more so than they are for other women in general.

I get that women who are “flat-chested” want boobs, and that they would look at me and think how perfect my life must be because I have such great boobs. But it’s the same thing as hair; if you have straight hair you want it curly, and vice versa.

I know if I had started out flat that I most certainly would have envied some women and their chesticles, but let me tell you that it stops being fun and flirty at a point and starts being a literal pain in your back.

Before my surgery, I woke up everyday at a four on the pain scale and went to bed at a six. EVERYDAY. From the age of 12, my back ached constantly. I rarely took pain killers because I was so used to the pain that it didn’t seem worth it to get the few hours of reprieve, especially when I knew it would just come back and feel worse once everything wore off. My surgeon was floored that I was just now getting a reduction at 25, seeing as I had been enduring pain like that since I was 12.

To top this whole catastrophe off, I’ll answer the last question: No, my boobs did not get me boyfriends.

They only garnered me the unwanted attention of men, because especially for younger men, the bigger the boob the bigger the slut until proven otherwise. By the time a guy knew me well enough to know that I was just the unfortunate nerd host to these sentient meat sacks of pain, I was no longer a sexual interest, but also not even a romantic one. It seemed that once I was one, I couldn’t be the other to a lot of guys.

I remember one of the football players in high school that was in my journalism class had pulled me aside one day and abruptly apologized for what the football team was saying about me. I hadn’t heard anything, so I asked what he was talking about, to which he nervously looked down quickly and whispered, “You know, about your… boobs.” I had not heard what the football team was saying about me, but I’m guessing that I’m glad I didn’t. I thanked him, and I thank him everyday for being so considerate of someone he barely knew over the people he played and worked with everyday.

I didn’t start dating until I was 22, and I think my boobs had a lot to do with that. Not that my love life is on fire now, but I think that I had integrated my boobs into my personal identity, and I knew what type of attention they drew to me. So I tended to steer clear of romantic and sexual attention, preferring to sit like the heroine of a YA novel – waiting to be swept off my feet by three different men while I saved the world from, I don’t know, zombie rabbits, or something.

My big take away from my year with less boob is this: a singular body part should not define who you are.

It should not be so deeply ingrained in your psyche as “a part of you” that it keeps you from doing the things you love to do. A body part shouldn’t effect your dating life or draw unwanted attention from people simply because it’s there. And you shouldn’t have to listen to people telling you to keep a part of yourself that is causing you harm, simply because others would “love to have that” or “wish they could have that.”

You should be able to remove, or add, the things to your body that you need for your survival, both physically AND mentally, whether that be adding insulin, removing a tumor, or adding boobs. So take that statement where you want to take it, because you deserve to feel like you.

. . .

Sarah ProctorLeave a comment

Where is the Christ in Christmas?

Ahh, Christmas. The snow, the joy, the merriment, the massive orgy in the woods. If one of those things seems a little off, than I’d like to ask you how much you really know about the origins of Christmas.

“Well, Sarah, it all starts when Mary and Joseph had to travel to Jerusalem -“

That’s where I’m going to stop you, because you’re dead wrong. You have been brainwashed by the Catholic Church, even if you aren’t Catholic. As a former Catholic and current pagan, I have been invited by the lovely Peachy Keen editors to educate you all on the true meaning of Christmas: distracting ourselves from the fear of the cold, starvation, and darkness by throwing wild sex parties around massive bonfires.

I want to make this clear now. I have been pagan for about a year, focusing on the Celtic and Norse pantheon. I have read about the Romans and Greeks, because, who hasn’t? I don’t know a ton about the Egyptians, or any religions on the eastern side of the world, so I don’t claim to be an expert by any means. I also want to point out that I’m doing this Drunk History style. I’ve got a beer and I’m just gonna talk out of my ass for awhile about a subject I truly love, exposing the Catholic Churches hidden secrets.

So, first and foremost: Jesus was not born in December. Not even close. The mention of a shepherd out with his flock is your first indication that this is probably closer to July or August, because if we go back to 8th grade ecology, we’ll remember that deserts are freakishly hot in the day time and dangerously cold in the night time, and while I have lived my whole life in the temperate forest we know as the Midwest, I can take a decent guess that those dangerously cold nights are even colder in winter. And, something some of you may not know, sheep are usually brought much closer to home in the winter so that they can be easily accessed for their wool and watched more closely, as prey is scarce in the winter and the predators will be more likely to come up to a large flock in the middle of nowhere rather than up in a village or city. So, now that we’re done with our crash course in sheep husbandry, it makes much more sense that this account of angels and sheep and God’s chosen son was more closely tied in with bathing suit season than hot cocoa and snuggling weather.

“Ok, so if Jesus was born in the summer, then why do we celebrate his birthday in the middle of winter?”

Excellent question! Do you know what, aside from Christmas, is happening in mid December?

Most notably is the winter solstice, which is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Imagine, you’re an ancient human from your area of choice in the northernmost Northern Hemisphere (that’s right, I’m not letting you get away with saying Jamaica so you can get out of this thought experiment). The days are getting shorter, colder, and hungrier. Your crops have all been harvested and stored, you’re collecting what food you can but your haul comes back smaller and smaller each time. I’m sure you’d start to get worried and sad, hoping you have enough to feed your family until the thaw. You begin to lose hope. So one of your neighbors comes up with an idea. “Hey, why don’t we light a huge fire on the shortest day to make it last longer. We can dance and sing and get drunk and… fool around. You know, to appease the gods.”

So the first guy to come up with this idea may have been a bit of a perv, much like the guy who figured out how to get milk, but it starts to catch on. In the midst of the darkness, you and your family and friends create your own light. You ask your gods to hurry up the winter (much like Groundhog’s Day), and you start giving offerings. A goose, some roasted chestnuts, whatever you can spare and emerge into the warmth of spring in a few months. And some of these gods preferred more… carnal offerings. And as people of faith tend to do, they delivered. They delivered to the point that when the Church sent missionaries out to the Celts and the Norse, they were appalled. These winter festivals of sex and merriment went against their whole schtick of “Suffer now be happy later.” So if they were going to get these people to accept Catholicism, they were going to have to rebrand these sex festivals. They let them live in tandem for a while, but eventually push came to shove and Yule and whatever Christmas was originally (I believe it was a day of fasting and penance much like Lent was meant to be) merged and the people decided to only keep the fun parts.

They kept a lot of the elements that we still know today, candles and fire and yule logs to burn through the long night instead of immense bonfires. A lot of people may already know this, but in Germanic and Norse regions, they would go and decorate the fir trees outside with trinkets and food to appease the forest spirits into helping them through. The excess of Christmas dinner and sweets comes from the principle of manifestation. If they were gluttonous and frivolous with their supplies on the darkest of nights, they must be prosperous next year. It was like a taunt to the gods I guess. “Look at us, we’re eating so much and it’s only the start of the cold, we must be so prosperous!”

Now for Santa. This is a one for one substitution. While there was a real Turkish man that would give money and trinkets to the poor, he is not the inspiration for Mr. Claus. No, that right is reserved for the All Father, Odin. That’s right, Thor’s gruff weird father who knows the secrets of the end of the world becomes jolly old saint Nick for Jól, the Norse word for the winter feast. Odin would go and reward his faithful servants with gifts. It may not have been the new PS5, but for Norse peoples it was a hope in a dark place. Hell, they didn’t even go that far from the source material. Odin’s eight legged horse equals Santa’s eight reindeer. Odin is even depicted frequently in a red suit and a wide brimmed hat. So I guess that makes Mrs. Clause Frigga, which I can get behind.

So, we’ve covered the Christmas tree, Santa Claus and his reindeer (which, by the way would be in rutting season at this time of year and the males would be extremely dangerous and also, have no horns due to shedding them. So just know that all of Santa’s reindeer have to be female), the yule log, the festive eating, and the fact that NONE OF IT CONTAINS JESUS. Not that Jesus wasn’t an amazing historical figure, but I feel like he may not be thrilled that we all celebrate his half birthday by giving gifts to each other while dressed as a Norse god and practicing ritualistic manifestation. So happy holidays, because while Christmas may seem like one holiday, it is the descendant of so many winter festivals and celebrations that there isn’t really a true “Christ” in Christmas. Celebrate the longest night of the year the way you want to, whether that’s honoring the Roman martyr, dressing like the All Father, or drinking the night away like the ancients.

. . .

Sarah ProctorLeave a comment