I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  More devastating, my breasts were also still not cooperating. My legs were growing, my feet were growing, my Osgood-Schlatter bump was growing, my anxiety was growing, but my boobs were not. Turns out they were more scared to go out into the world than I was. To make matters weirder, I think my nipples were growing. But not my actual breasts. Well, that’s not true. One of them was growing. But not the other. I looked like Barbie if someone had second thoughts and bailed halfway through microwaving her.

  I compensated for the sternum disparity by becoming a master illusionist, by crafting a bra layering system that made it seem as if I had a modicum of a figure. I saved money for months to order one of the bras from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. It was forest-green satin with giant wide straps and a tiny bow between the cups. I am not sure why of all the colors I could choose, I picked the one chosen by the Girl Scouts of America and Shrek’s wife.

  The first layer was a bra that clasped in the back, a wireless sort of training bra, which served as my base. Then I cut a padded bra in half and put just the one cup on the flatter side of my sternum to even out the situation. Then I had another bra over that, with a clasp in the front, pulling it all together. I topped off this morass of fabric and wires with a sports bra that I pulled over my head to mush all the layers into what could from forty feet away look like an actual chest of a human girl, although up close, it looked like an octopus was trying to get out of a trash bag, so I tried not to get too close to anyone.

  I actually wore this bra combo for a couple years, very satisfied by the attention my handiwork got me from teenage boys, even given the incredibly low bar they set once their bodies had been kidnapped by testosterone. I had zero guilt about my ruse because, after all, it was a secret between me and Victoria.

  That summer I went to Florida with my sister and father. The weeks leading up to the trip, I was terrified about what I was going to wear to the beach. I was able to make my fabricated chest symmetrical under a shirt, but that was on dry land. I’d have had to be David Blaine to make my boobs look somewhat realistic in a bathing suit with water involved. Fortunately I didn’t end up having to go into the water to watch my Franken-chest float away into the sea, but I did have something equally as traumatizing happen: I hooked up with a lacrosse player.

  My sister and I were always up to no good, and one night we snuck into the lobby of a neighboring hotel, where some lacrosse teams were staying for a tournament or whatever lacrosse players play in. I don’t know how it happened exactly, since I drank four Amaretto sours, but I ended up making out with one of the lacrosse bros on the beach. By this point I had already lost my virginity, but not in a way that prepared me for making out with anyone.

  I know you’re going to think I’m making this up, and sometimes I even think I am, but I lost my virginity in the Virgin Islands. I know, too on the nose. I was on a cruise with my dad and Jessica. They were by the pool most of the time, and this activity was out of the question for me given my jerry-rigged sternum padding situation, so I wandered off and ended up losing my virginity to some guy from Schenectady, New York. The main headline is that while it happened I was so focused on keeping my triple bra contraption on that I didn’t pay attention to anything else that was happening. Now that I actually know what sex entails, I am shocked that this boy was able to keep an erection despite the lumpy bandage-like contraption around my chest. All I did was lie there and intensely pray it didn’t fall off. I was so still and quiet that I would not be surprised if this guy was a necrophiliac.

  When I made out with the lacrosse player on the beach, I also worked very hard to keep my array of bras on and in place, much to this poor boy’s confusion. Every time he would put his hands near my chest, I would move them away, borderline swatting at him with a Kung Fu chopping motion. His deep need to see under my bras was yet another reminder that boobs are very, very important. By this point, I wasn’t even sure I would have been able to take them off if I had tried, given how intertwined they had all become, but I also couldn’t take the chance that he’d see my stunted log jam of a sternum.

  A year or so later I found myself on the floor of a trailer in Ocean City, Maryland, making out with a guy who was way less patient with my makeshift breasts. And yes, I’m going to blow by the whole “floor of a trailer” piece. There’s not much to say about it besides that I make strong choices, people. Trust me, I wish hooking up with guys on beer- and blood-stained carpets was anomalous back then, but since I wasn’t really introduced to the concept of dignity until like twelve years later, let’s just say I had a lot of rug burn on my lower back for a couple weeks following many a spring break.

  The Maryland guy was older and somewhat experienced, so he was able to unclasp one bra with one hand. I remember thinking he must be a magician or something because it took me three or four tries with two hands and I did it every day. I now know he was probably just promiscuous and that I’m very lucky he didn’t give me herpes or whatever the hip STD was back then. I thought he should be my boyfriend, so decided it was worth taking my muddle of bras off and back then I thought nudity was a surefire way to make someone love you. I took one off, then another, then another. I was like one of those Russian nesting dolls, but with way deader eyes.

  Once all the layers came off, I remember him looking at my chest quizzically. His face had a mixture of confusion and sympathy, basically every emotion except arousal. I was of course mortified but also slightly validated that someone else saw the same thing I saw. Something was wrong. He avoided my boob altogether for the remaining three hours of our drunken, seemingly endless, completely unenjoyable hookup. I didn’t get a boyfriend out of it, but I did get even more insecure about my Picasso-y chest.

  By the time I turned fourteen, I was getting impatient. I wanted my symmetrical boobs and I wanted them now. Getting good grades and being funny was getting exhausting, and I wanted the free attention from my dad that my stepmother Jessica got so effortlessly.

  The major curveball within this incongruence of curves was that, as you know if you read the last chapter, this was around when my eating disorder decided to hijack my brain. If you didn’t read the last chapter, this paragraph is going to be deeply baffling. The eating disorder therapist told me that not eating would cause my breast tissue to stop growing, but my eating disorder told me she was a lying, cunning psycho who was dead set on sabotaging my happiness, so I didn’t listen. Given how little protein I was eating, my long-awaited period had stopped, and so did the lopsided growth of my chest. This is pretty obvious, but if you don’t eat, breast tissue can’t grow, and since breasts have fatty tissue in them, when you lose weight, they are often the first to go. As you know, I didn’t get a handle on eating again until my mid-twenties, so essentially my eating disorder smashed my dreams of a perfect chest.

  When I was about nineteen, I moved to L.A. and promptly fell madly in love with a guy. Let me rephrase that: I became magnetically attracted to a man who perfectly re-created my childhood circumstances, but I was conditioned to think that was “love at first sight.” This was before I had any addiction or codependence therapy, so I basically moved in with anyone who reminded me of my dad. This guy was nomadic, randomly flying from L.A. to New York, keeping me in a state of paralyzing anxiety that I thought could only be true love. You now know that this was me in the glory days of my codependence, which was taking hold and distorting my reality like a funhouse mirror in desperate need of Windex.

  I became very, very preoccupied with let’s call him Mark. Where he was, what he was doing, what he wasn’t doing, what I could do to make him do what I wanted him to do . . . I didn’t yet know that other people weren’t responsible for my emotional needs, so I exhausted myself with high expectations and emotional perfectionism. After reading Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix, easily my least favorite title of my most favorite book, I realized that Mark had all the negative qualities of my primary caretakers, which is part
of why I was so magnetically attracted to him. He triggered my comfort zone of emotions: uncertainty, anxiety, self-doubt. These feelings gave me the drug I could never get enough of: adrenaline. It made me feel alive, awake, and like I was in a sexy action movie. Because of my tendency to emotionally time travel, my subconscious mind concluded that getting him to love me would heal all my old, bleeding invisible wounds. I know what you’re thinking—back in my twenties, I was a real catch.

  Mark often had lunch with one of his platonic girlfriends, of whom I was insanely jealous but pretended not to be, desperate to come off as the “cool girl.” I mean, she ate lunch. Who eats lunch? They hung out and I pretended not to care. Long story longer, I ended up flying to New York to see him for the Christmas holiday. And by see him, I mean check up on and micromanage his behavior because I had old abandonment fear coming up and which made me unable to breathe. One day Mark was out working and I was left alone in his apartment. Now, let me just remind you about the mis-wired neural pathways I had back then before I admit the terrible decisions I made that night: I had seen adultery growing up, I was in the haze of my codependence and addictive behaviors, and I was also very, very hungry. I would never do this today, but kids . . . I went through his computer. I managed to guess his password, which is shocking, given that today I forget my own password easily twice a week.

  I found nothing. Mostly just trying-too-hard photos of me I had sent him in the hopes of making him think I didn’t try too hard. This was before I knew my angles and how to put makeup on, so the photos looked more like I had been taken hostage by a high school yearbook photographer. After sleuthing for a while, I was ready to give up on finding something incriminating that would give me a hit of my beloved drug, adrenaline, until I had the very insane but also straight-up brilliant idea to go into his trash folder. I know, I’m a sick, sick genius. When I opened it, a cornucopia of photos of breasts appeared before me as if a pimp had made a PowerPoint presentation. This trash folder had almost as many boobs as the Instagram “discover” page. My heart sank. So did my stomach and lungs and liver and uterus. This is of course a rough situation for any girl, but I think my body took it as an opportunity to release a bunch of old repressed pain I had never processed, so the floodgates of emotion opened with a bang. As I cried, I felt a deep pain in my bones, like twenty ghosts were beating me up.

  When Mark came home, I lost my mind on the poor guy. Girl, I was Interrupted. The worst part of me going apeshit on him is that as much as I loved being the victim and stewing in my glorious self-righteous indignation, it turns out that I was crazy, but not crazy enough to check the date the photos were taken. Turns out, the photos were from years before we had even met. I probably should have known given the orange iMac G3 desktop computer in the background of the nudies, but this was way before I developed a relationship with the concept of logic.

  That day I learned the hard way that a quick double tap shows you the date a picture was taken, but the real takeaway from this mess was that the photos only heightened my paranoia about my unacceptable body, given that they were of nothing but boobs. Looking back with a modicum of clarity, I can now say they were actually really beautiful, but that was the problem. Her breasts were gorgeous, perky, symmetrical, and—dare I say it?—effortless. I know that’s a weird adjective to use when describing breasts, but for my whole life thus far, my boobs were a full-time job to manage: the hiding, the manipulating, the leveling, the resenting, the squishing. I just wanted my boobs to be easy.

  After this incident, I became even more obsessed with breasts, or maybe more specifically, my lack of symmetrical ones. I hope this admission doesn’t get me slapped with multiple lawsuits, but I was so into comparing myself to other women that when I went to the gym I started ogling women’s breasts while furiously working out on the elliptical. They’re everywhere! And they’re all so unique and bouncy! This was the closest I will probably ever be to understanding what it’s like to be a man, and guys, please hear me when I say this: I am so sorry for your plight. I had no idea. Being transfixed by boobs is exhausting.

  And yes, I often pondered if this traumatic incident suddenly made me reject men and “become” a lesbian or something. But that’s not really how neurology or being gay works. I wish it had been that simple; in fact, it’s always been a dream of mine to be a lesbian, but I guess the universe didn’t want that for me. It wanted me to live a life of redundant fighting about fighting and a revolving door of stubbly testicles.

  My self-loathing was exacerbated by every perfect set of breasts I saw. One of my favorite quotes is from an inspirational speaker named Iyanla Vanzant: “Comparison is an act of violence against the self.” That quote hit me right in the solar plexus. If comparison is a form of violence against yourself, me, myself, and I were in a nuclear war.

  One day after a dentist appointment, I was walking through Beverly Hills, looking for my car, which I swear isn’t as boring as it sounds, given that in my twenties, parking my car always became a psychological thriller. I never remembered where it was and always put too little money in the meter, so every time I parked, I would basically go into debt. This was way before I understood that spending three extra minutes to do something right could save you an hour and eighty dollars in the long run. I had not yet subscribed to a slogan I now live by from the Navy SEALs: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” Ironic enough, when I was twenty-five, finding my car an hour after I parked it was a job cut out only for SEAL Team Six.

  So I was desperately speed-walking around Beverly Hills, looking for my car as if I were five and lost my mother at the mall. My heart was racing, my bank account bracing. I walked past all the fancy stores, luminescent and wasteful, blinded by the relentless L.A. sun. Every time I walk around Beverly Hills, I’m consumed by both wonder and disgust. It feels like I’m finally in the streets of Oz that I so badly wanted to skip down as a kid, but now that I’m here, it’s ultimately just a bunch of stuff I can’t afford behind glass I can’t break. Given my proclivity to become enamored with unavailable people and things, Rodeo Drive is my Narnia. I temporarily stopped looking for my car and became hypnotized by the resplendent windows of Fendi, Gucci, and Prada. This was in 2008, when Gucci had a season of glam western-inspired clothing, which is my kryptonite, given it’s pretty much my dream in life to be confident enough to dress like a rhinestone cowgirl.

  My fantasy came to an abrupt halt when an employee appeared from behind a mannequin and started undressing it. Rather violently, if I may say so myself. It’s probably not healthy to anthropomorphize a mannequin, but I was truly worried about it. Her. Anyway, seconds later I was face-to-face with the emaciated mannequin, toe-to-toe with her cubist head and vacant eyes. After a moment I realized that I was essentially looking at myself. Maybe that’s why I assigned human qualities to her, because it was like looking in a mirror. Only the mannequin had perfect, symmetrical breasts, with tiny white nipples, of course. I looked at her face. She looked oddly proud. I can’t say it sat well with me that an inanimate, expressionless body made of fiberglass looked happier than I was. I suddenly noticed in the reflection that my head fit perfectly on the mannequin’s body, and all my features were superimposed over hers. I saw a vision of what it would be like to have symmetrical breasts. For a fleeting moment, I felt perfect.

  I kept walking, brain on fire about how I would get those mannequin boobs onto my sternum. As I perused the other store windows, I came across a small door in between the luxury brand behemoths. Something—maybe the lack of luster—drew me to it. This door was the ugly duckling in the Emerald City that is Beverly Hills. On it was a litany of doctors’ names in faded gold letters: cosmetic dentistry, rhinoplasty, veneers. And there it was: breast reconstruction. I had fantasized many times before about getting one small implant to even things out, but it went against everything I believed in. I wanted to be a role model, a paragon of self-acceptance. I wanted to be the person I needed when I was a kid, so
a procedure to alter my appearance was always out of the question. There is no way I was going to let someone hack into my body to mold me into society’s impossible physical ideal. Also, I didn’t have money, so I couldn’t really afford to believe anything else.

  I opened the door and walked down a long hallway. I came across the door for the doctor who did breast reconstruction: it was a very underwhelming door. I had somewhat of an out-of-body experience when I went into the office. My survivalist brain took over and dragged me to the reception desk, where I asked for an appointment with the doctor. She was incredibly nice, which I found shocking. I assumed she’d judge me, throw tomatoes at me, laugh at me, accuse me of being insecure and shallow, tell me I was contributing to a harmful social construct—all the things I was accusing myself of in my head. This was before I knew that we assume everyone sees us the way we see ourselves. I was disgusted with myself, so I figured she would be disgusted with me, too. The only judgment she expressed was when I pulled out my sad check card, which you could tell before swiping it wasn’t gonna go through.

  I managed to convince her to let me pay for the appointment when I returned. I had just booked a job for an online talk show that paid way more than I had ever made, so I was finally able to afford things like gas and brand-name birth control. I never thought the day would come when I could actually pronounce the name of my birth control, but here I was, living the American dream.

  A month later, I met with the breast reconstruction doctor. He was comically late, which I found shocking given that the people signing up to see him were probably up against enough emotional stress, but if I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that the lower your expectations are of people, the happier you’ll be. The doctor burst into the room and fired off very personal questions while struggling to write things down with a pen that was out of ink and seemed to have been so for a while now. He did that thing where you put the pen to your tongue to try to, you know, moisten it up. This, for whatever reason, for me is the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, so I am shocked I didn’t puke on him. The good/bad news is that I had not eaten lunch due to my eating disorder, so the only reason I didn’t is because there really wasn’t anything available to throw up.