Yes, I have saggy boobs

and you should break that mirror too.

She was a slut before she even knew what that meant.

Her aunties would laugh at her chest whenever she lifted her top, her mother would call her names for the fun of it. She would stare at her sisters, her cousins, and a sodden realization would dawn on her that she was different.

Her friends would call her “slippers” as a joke, not taking note of her face crumbling under the weight of the insult, and the sound of her heart crashing in her chest.

She soon learned that the way she’d come into the world meant that she’d been used, even though she’d never even known the touch of a man. She learned that the sorry state of her boobs was evidence of her sins, no matter how much she told them she’d never done those things.

She stared at the porn magazines, with women and their tits held high, round and large and upright. Tits that bounced when they walked and didn’t let gravity claim them. Tits that announced themselves and took up space when they entered a room. Tits that the boys in her class would fantasize about and desire in whoever they were with. Breasts she didn’t have. Breasts that soon marked her as a failure. Breasts that meant she could never be desired.

But she wanted it so much — to be loved by a man.

Her mother had told her that it was the greatest gift. The movies she watched told her to be desired was the greatest prize, the best feeling.

Such a type of desire didn’t come freely. Conditions had to be met. Rules she never had a say in. The women and the princesses she watched in the movies were inherently beautiful, and fuck her, they had great boobs too. She drew out that to be loved, she had to change.

And so she tried to change. Tried to mold herself into someone she was utterly not.

She spent her savings on push-up bras and the breast lift tonics that never worked, lifting them up because a friend told her it would help. Whenever she took a photo, she sat perched on her laptop in Photoshop, making sure her boobs were “just right,” that their sad state never showed itself in her Instagram posts. She even started saving up more to get them augmented.

And with all that came what she thought she truly wanted: desire. With it came men who would reach for her chest before they knew her heart, whose lustful gazes would fall when they saw what was truly underneath those clothes. With it came a hollow emptiness she could not place a finger on. With it came the realization that her life and her image was a complete and utter lie.

With this came the loneliness and self-hatred, the nagging thought that no matter how much she spent on editing and padding up her bras, the instant her shirt lifted the real her lay there.

“But is this truly what I want?” she would find herself asking, standing naked in the mirror, staring at herself with all the flaws, staring at the person she had tried so hard to reject. “To be desired just for a body I’ve never made peace with?” She knew she was more than that. She knew she could craft words so deep they left their mark, she knew she could paint images so raw they mirrored life, she knew she loved to dance, she loved to sing, she loved to be in touch with the arts. She knew she liked musicals and would sing to Hamilton when doing Sunday cleaning. She knew she was more than just boobs and a pretty face, and she wanted someone who would see her for what she was and not what she had, even though she’d spent so many years doing the exact opposite.

Something shattered but this time it wasn’t her

She threw the mirror at the floor.

Not out of anger, or out of desperation, or hatred for herself, but out of a steady realization that she’d spent years listening to people talk her down for what was hers.

She’d listened to men who were never ready to truly love her to begin with, despite all she’d done to her body. She’d listened to the wants she’d spent all her life chasing but still couldn’t find.

She’d spent years listening to people make rules about what was never theirs.

And finally, all that was left was just her. Not broken, but whole. And human. Unapologetically human.

---

Based on a true story.