A Letter to my Flat Chest

Scratch that—a letter to you

By Emma Chekroun

There’s no feeling quite like sitting in your eighth grade classroom while watching two people flip through a yearbook filled with you and your classmates to decide who’s ugly. It seems so mundane until you overhear their conversation and realize exactly what they are doing. By the time they reach your photo, you’re already resigned to the fact that this probably won’t go well. You hold your breath and hope that they skip you—so you don’t have to be reminded that you’re not the only one who doesn’t like how you look. 

I can attest to how weird it is to watch two people share a moment in which they decide that you’re ugly. And the weirdness lies not so much in the debate itself—everyone judges—but rather how to-the-point the debate is. There’s no ambiguity or passivity. It’s direct. You know that they have anointed themselves as the authorities on all things pretty. You know your picture is coming up. And, devoid of your input and emotions, you watch helplessly as the verdict is passed down. You’re ugly. Point blank, bring down the gavel, court adjourned. 

Surprisingly, the worst part for me was not the judgement. In fact, the judgement itself hurt very little—not that I didn’t think I was ugly. I knew I was ugly. They may as well have added that the sky was blue. And that, reader, was precisely the issue: it felt natural to feel ugly.

When I set out to write this letter, I wanted to address it to my middle school chest. Nothing made me more insecure growing up than the flatness of my chest. But I now realize that I don’t need that letter. My chest doesn’t need that letter. Now, at 22 years old, I still have a small chest, and I’m alright with that. So I’m addressing this to the girls younger than me—in middle school, in high school, who are starving themselves, like I did, avoiding mirrors, like I did, imagining the day they could get a boob job, like I did. And I need to start off by saying: the road to self-acceptance is not going to be easy. 

 Reader, there are few things in life that are universally true. Take comfort in this one: you will always be more than your appearance. Maybe not to everyone, but to the people who matter, the sum of your features is a minor part of a much larger picture. Your intelligence, your kindness, your music taste, the way you hug, the way you dance, the way you laugh, and yes, how you look, will all sum up to you. But you will never be just your appearance. 

And that fact took me a while to understand. If you saw me now, you may think that I can’t relate to feeling anything but skinny. I’m 5’2” and a size zero without diet or exercise. But when I was 15, still 5’2”, I weighed 71 lbs, and no healthy, well-adjusted teen goes into high school that size. The summer between middle school and high school was one of the worst for my self esteem. After three years of being disappointed with my flat chest, I decided to take measures into my own hands. While I couldn’t control the size of my chest, I could control the size of my waist, and somehow, I began to believe that the flatter my stomach was, the larger my chest would look—please take a moment to laugh, reader, because that logic is truly absurd. But that’s how I thought.

Throughout that period of my life, I dreaded the beach. A visit to the beach always induced panic because it meant my body would be on full display. I would abstain from eating the entire night before until I would finally give up and eat pasta while sobbing. This would eventually result in me trying to throw up what I had eaten.Yet all I knew about bulimia was informed by television, so I didn’t realize that you had to throw up immediately after eating. I don’t know if that is really funny or really sad, but it happened. It took going into highschool at 5’2” and 71 lbs and a very concerned conversation with a doctor and my mom to realize that my eating habits needed to change. Finding out that staying as underweight as I was could mean I would be unable to have kids down the road was enough to shock me out of it. That was my wake up call.  

But to this day I don’t really consider myself as having an eating disorder. I have always seen myself as someone who skipped a few meals and was always on the skinny side. Growing up, I had a very specific idea of what someone with an eating disorder looked like. That person never ate or ate comically small portions. I never thought someone with an eating disorder could look like me—I just thought I had chronic low self-esteem. According to the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA), this could be why broader definitions of eating disorders are being used in research in the U.S. More than five percent of girls met the criteria for an eating disorder when a group of nearly 500 young girls were followed from age 12 to 20 by researchers. But after researchers expanded the study to include nonspecific eating disorder symptoms, that percentage went up to 13, according to research published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.    

It didn’t take long after my recovery before I found a new issue to fixate on: my skin. This new obsession could likely be linked to body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), which is characterized by spending excessive amounts of time worrying about flaws that don’t exist or are minimal—in some cases to the degree of impairing day-to-day life.

And my focus on my skin did impair my day-to-day life. Throughout high school my skin was the worst it had ever been. Every night, I would obsessively go to the mirror and take a black head extractor to various parts of my face hoping to get rid of any new blemish I found. It got so bad that I often had more scabs than acne. 

This type of skin picking is one possible symptom of BDD. The age that this symptom developed is not unusual; BDD often begins around the ages of 12–13, and according to the International OCD Foundation, two-thirds of people with BDD experience onset before the age of 18, which is when most people graduate high school. 

There were times when I picked my skin so aggressively that I was left with small gash-like spots. I remember one in particular resembled the charred and bloodied appearance of a cigarette burn. I quickly learned I could hide my picking with Band-Aids. I would go to work on a spot, slap a Band-Aid on it, and then make up a lie the next day about hitting a door or burning myself with a curling iron. When I wasn’t hiding my spots with Band-Aids, I was hiding myself from the world. The International OCD Foundation lists avoiding social situations or going out less to avoid others seeing flaws as one of many signs of BDD. I hated the part of the day where I had to take off my thick concealer and  look at the bright red spots and scabs left behind. I made sure to always be in my room when my makeup was off, and if I had to pass anyone while leaving my room, I would keep my head down. I would also often wait until late at night to leave my room, so the chance of running into anyone in the house was even less likely. The budding mounds on my face took priority over my former insecurity—the mounds on my chest that refused to bud. 

Thanks to Victoria's Secret, and the fact that, instead of stuffing, I could just spend $50 on a bra that did the stuffing for me, my breast insecurities became more subconscious. While I didn’t feel the same dread about my chest as I did about my skin, reader, I don’t think you can call wearing a push up bra everyday loving your chest. At least I couldn’t.

And, from middle school to now, I’ve arrived at this conclusion: you can’t love yourself until you accept yourself. I couldn’t love my chest until I accepted it, and the path was never as simple as just deciding that I would accept my small chest. My appearance is always changing. It’s a never-ending process. Liking something about yourself in one moment is easier than accepting that thing in any and every given moment. Our skin, our bodies, ourselves—we change. And while our appearances may be different, our value isn’t. These stories won’t make you accept or love yourself. 

There’s no perfect path to reaching the point where you’re okay with what you see in the mirror because paths inevitably come to an end. For several years after that eighth grade yearbook experience, I wouldn’t let anyone take my photo. I still worry about what people think of me, that I’m the ugly “fill in the blank.” Ugly girlfriend, ugly student, ugly sister, ugly managing editor—I choose those labels more often than I’d like to admit. But I no longer cringe when someone takes my photo. That, reader, is what I mean when I say that self-love is not a path because the process of learning to love yourself doesn’t end. I’m not where I want to be with my self-esteem, and I’m writing a story that hasn’t come to an end. But, that doesn’t mean I’m not further along from where I started, and that’s what matters.   

No back, rack or curve 

But how can you be happy?

Because I said so