Loving a Body that Feels Broken
TW: disordered eating
What do you do with a body four months post-mastectomy? An entire third of a goddamn year, but in many ways I feel like I just got home from the hospital. Initially I did not feel the shame and repulsion I feared— instead, I was proud of what my body had gone through and the work we put in to get here. I don’t really understand where here is, though. I’m learning that work has to be ongoing, or I will fall right back into old, destructive thought patterns. Sadly, like many women I have always had an extremely difficult relationship with my body. It never quite looked like I thought it was supposed to, and we fought— sometimes brutally— to make it conform to a shape it doesn’t want to and likely cannot be. I have always struggled with understanding where my body exists in space, with what I look like, and having a double mastectomy and reconstruction is not a great way to fix this problem.
I can finally lay back on the bench at the gym without crying, cardio and I are getting reacquainted, and my breast surgeon complimented me on how well I am sitting up from laying down. I’m tiptoeing in to yoga once a week, continuously humbled by what my body can and cannot do. Poses that used to bring relief are currently quite painful, and I have to fight to put aside the ego that is enraged by lack of access. My body tries to make amends with me by developing cool party tricks, like the one where I can’t feel if I’ve spilled water on myself or the one where I can touch the inside of my right breast but feel it on the outside (my breast surgeon suggested workshopping something involving cigarettes, we’re working on it).
Much to my frustration, the last month or so has been marked by creeping feelings of self-hatred, often rooted in post-surgical weight gain. That shouldn’t matter, right? I went through eleven hours of surgery to remove and rebuild my breasts, I don’t have a thyroid, of course my body is going to cling to whatever it can. Aaron tossed our scale a couple of years ago, and that went a long way towards freeing up space in my brain for me to love my body for what it does and not for the number associated with it. I quit obsessing over keto, paleo, whatever style of eating I thought might solve the problem of my relationship with myself. The amount of space I take up shouldn’t matter, I want to be celebrating myself for what I’ve come through and how I’ve come through it.
And yet here I am, feeling somewhat bombarded by images of superfit previvors on instagram, training for their surgeries and seemingly immediately returning to form weeks after their mastectomies. Of course I want to celebrate the amazing accomplishments of these women— running a marathon post-mastectomy, what a thing!— but I sometimes feel like just being able to stand up straight after surgery should be just as celebrated. The pressure for women’s bodies to look new, different, better even after incredible trauma is immense, and it is a struggle for me to reject it. If I am currently incapable of loving my body, I long to at least be indifferent and the reemergence of disordered thought patterns sends me spinning. Instead, I feel the old siren call of restriction. If I just put myself on an extreme diet long enough to drop a few pounds, my self esteem will definitely come right back! Leading up to surgery I had recurring thoughts of how I needed to skip meals in the hospital so I wouldn’t gain weight. I cannot explain to you how fucked up and dangerous this is; one of the most important things you do after a surgery like DIEP is make sure you eat a high protein diet so your body can heal. Healing means nourishment, and nourishment means eating. Yet in the back of my mind almost every time I ate something (particularly if it was something that tasted good) was the thought that I was making myself too big.
This is garbage, and yet it still feels so alluring. I have a deep-seated urge to punish my body for betraying me, but the body keeps the score and will punish me right back. How do you integrate a body that is new, that still has another surgery to go before we can really start to figure out what things are going to look like? I’m supposed to have an answer in a post like this, right? Suggesting gentle self-care like a bath bomb or journaling or lighting a fucking candle. I must’ve spent hundreds of dollars on variations of vanilla-scented candles, but my sadness persists. I’m drinking more water, but there is a hunger and a shame in me that will not be satiated. My right arm (the side where they did an axillary lymph node biopsy) feels consistently more swollen than the left, but its visible only to me. Its so, so easy to start to obsess; I wrap my fingers around my wrist, checking to see if they finally touch again. I get measured for a bra and see my band size has gone up and start to panic. I punish myself by trying to put on a wedding ring I know will not fit. I feel a near-constant urge to ask my husband if I look different, code for I don’t feel right and don’t know what to do with myself.
There is no right answer, I suppose. My only option is to keep pushing forward, acknowledging the bad feelings but refusing to let them pull me fully below the surface. My value is not rooted in numbers—its rooted in how I treat others, it is inherent in my being. And yet, I struggle. On days like today I have to make peace with just being here, acknowledge the discomfort and rage I feel in and toward my body, and wait for it to pass.
