Body Positive??

I used to walk around my house naked. blinds up, windows open. I didn’t care. When other were busy covering up I was letting it all hang out.

I don’t do that anymore. Ever since my last surgery I have to be in a sports bra almost 24/7 for the next few months. It’s been an adjustment. Going from someone that takes my bra off the second I can, finding them the next day under the couch and in the corner of the living room to always having it on my body. Being naked so much meant I often caught glimpses of my nakedness in the mirrors or reflection of widows. It means I had an intimate knowledge of my body and what it looked like and how it moved.

Breast cancer and my surgeries have taken the once intimate knowledge I held. The other day I was in my closet where the only full length mirror in my house exits and I got naked and I looked. I turned, I made myself look at each part of my body individually and then pulled back and looked at it as a whole. I don’t know why but it felt so important to look at myself and really see.  It no longer felt like mine, and I so badly need it to feel like mine. It’s taken me months to really look at how my new breast have settled. To really see the dimples in my implants. To look at the new stretch marks created by steroids from chemo.

A few months ago I went to a Dita Von Teese show. My best friend and I bought tickets months before and it ended up that the show was a mere 2 weeks after my exchange surgery to swap my tissue expanders to implants. I sat there loving all the beautiful and natural bodies, but there was a part of me chocking back silent tears. This was a celebration of the various body types, all the ways to show that normal bodies are beautiful bodies. It’s an important message for sure, but it’s one I feel very left out of.

I looked down at my fake breast stuffed in my corset, seeing every simple hardness and imperfection. I sat there  watching and wondering where the scars were. Where the disabilities were. Where the mastectomy breast were. My body is not in the range of “normal.” While every one is shouting the beauty of stretch marks and cellulite (which lets be honest we ALL have) I wanted to know where were the voices shouting the beauty of disability? The beauty in sheer survival etched in skin. Where were the breast that didn’t bounce because that beautiful softness had been forcefully replaces with hardened implants. Where were the women who can’t dance so gracefully because they are in wheelchairs or amputees? If something happened to anyone of these women in the same way it had happened to me, if parts of them had been slowly cut off and replaced by artificialness would they still be happily shouting about loving their bodies?

It opened my eyes once again, that if I want to see the beauty in these things I have to be the one to put it out there.

I have been asked to be in the local burlesque show coming up. I said yes almost immediately and felt that maybe it would be healing for me because it’s so close to the one year anniversary of my double mastectomy . Today though as I was  driving and thinking about it, I burst into tears. Going up on that stage is me reclaiming my body as my own. It’s saying fuck normal. It’s saying there are many ways to be confident and secure and beautiful. Hopefully soon it will get me back to walking around naked, blind open, windows open for all to see.