Cup Size

It occurred to me when I was eleven and drunk because you got drunk to impress the older boys, as one of them pulled up my shirt and they all laughed at a training bra that covered the nothing that had grown there because puberty wasn't going to hit for two more years, it occurred to me that convincing my dad to buy me a padded bra and stuffing it full every day was how you got people to like you. Then when I was thirteen and my best friend told me that one day I would be hot, that I was just an ugly duckling, and it was perfectly okay in his mind to tell me that right now I was worth nothing but eventually I would grow into being what everyone wanted me to be: a beautiful woman. So I took this information and found all the ways to make my boobs look bigger and took a million pictures and then sent them to the same boy who pulled up my shirt two years before and soaked in the praises he gave me. He would call me every night and whisper obscenities while I usually painted my nails and faked moans. I was unaware that a horny freshman boy wasn't the biggest and most important thing in the entire world because no one ever told me that I was worth more than weighing eighty six pounds and filling out my A cup. When I snuck out to see the nerdy kid who called himself my boyfriend that same year I had no idea that he would want to touch me down there and I had no idea how to say no, because the girl who did it before him assured me she was getting me ready to be a good girlfriend and we were practicing, and the man who did it before both of them never told me a single thing other than I was beautiful and if I opened my god damn mouth I would be worthless and no one would ever want me, so I let my nerdy boyfriend touch me and didn't realise it was supposed to be fun for me, too. When I was fifteen in a car for my first time with a senior boy who I swore I was in love with, my shirt came off it occurred to me that my bra wouldn't push up anything and he seemed off put by the fact that they weren't bigger, so I shrugged and let him hurt me and pretended if felt good while holding in the sobs that later that night racked my body down to the core. That same year I gave myself away to anyone interested in a flat chested, insecure, coke head because I still hadn't gotten my much awaited breasts yet and I needed constant affirmation that I was worthy of love and someone twisted it around in my head at some unknown time that love equals sex and love equals happiness. In the end I felt neither love nor happiness and to make it painfully clear how little I was getting out of this, I was under the impression that girls could never orgasm and I became the queen of faking it. At some point between beds my fifteen year old self decided it was enough and swallowed an entire bottle of Tylenol because life still wasn't anything more than boob size and sex equals love. Naturally three months later when a very pretty boy introduced me to his friends and told my mother he would take good care of me, my insides shook and my heart melted because he looked at me like I was something other than another broken toy to conquer and I believed it. It says a lot about my innocence that I still like to believe that he would've stayed with me if we hadn't gone to that party and gotten caught, even though the girl who he chose instead has reminded me countless times in the back of my head that he never, ever loved me. Maybe it was this span of eleven through fifteen that made me so angry as I shaved my head into a Mohawk and pretended I didn't give one single fuck, but sometime in the middle of all those fucks I stopped giving I realised that sex and love weren't always synonymous and set out to find ways to make myself happy. Eventually those goddamned boobs made their appearance but by then I stopped caring who was looking, because when you stop accepting every invitation to hop in bed eventually they stop coming so regularly. Maybe this whole story would have no meaning if it didn't end with my finding a way to love myself. I have no idea if this revelation came from some caring blogger or the realisation that I liked myself a whole lot more when other people didn't determine my worth. All I know is that from the time i was old enough to talk my head was packed full of "ladies do this," "pretty girls wear this" and not nearly enough "love yourself how you are". The only thing I have to show for this profound change in me is the fact that my sister knows that she is more than her cup size because I've taken every opportunity I have to remind her that A or D doesn't determine a thing about her brain or how pure her heart remains. Maybe the fact that this story is in no way unique from millions of other girls stories speaks volumes on the changes we need to make. I never knew I was worth more than my tit size and the boy I was sleeping with, but I make sure everyone else does.