Darling, your body is yours to wear as you fancy.
[No. 13]
DID YOU HAVE BREAST CANCER, AND DID YOU HAVE YOUR BREASTS REMOVED?
“I am a strong bodied person. And the thing of it was, the things I thought would kill me in my life, maybe even the things I wished had, didn’t.”
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
No, and yes. Breast cancer itself was not directly part of my physical experience. I had thyroid cancer at age 21 and then tested positive for the BRCA1 mutation five years later. With the consciousness and instinct I felt at that time in my life, I opted to have a preventive double mastectomy with reconstruction [on David Bowie’s birthday]. I was 32. Then, at age 40, I decided to get an explant surgery and went flat. I have talked about this in great detail and even wrote a book about it. I proudly wore my raw body on Equinox billboards, and you can see me naked if you Google any of this.
Image by Hailley Howard
[No. 14]
HOW DOES IT FEEL WITH A FLAT CHEST? I HAD A BILATERAL MASTECTOMY; ALL I WANTED WAS TO GET THE TUMOR OUT. I SOMETIMES FEEL INSECURE WITH A FEAR OF PEOPLE NOT THINKING OF ME AS FEMALE. THERE ARE TIMES WHEN I THINK OF ALL THE DRESSES AND TANK TOPS I CAN’T WEAR. HOW DID YOU BECOME SO OKAY WITH YOUR BODY?
What feels both compelling and very vulnerable to say is that I feel more at home in my body without breasts. It’s taken me, for all my talk of honesty, quite a few years to think and then say that. But here we are, and it feels so good to be here. Together.
I am grateful for my health [and yours], and yet my cancer feels a memory. When I dig deep, this contentment in the flesh vessel with all I possess has less to do with this and more to do with liberation, with androgyny, with gender [which is ever-evolving].
One fascinating fluke is that the night before my masectomy I took some digital photographs for posterity’s sake, and they mysteriously vanished. My camera [my psyche] no longer had space for them. I will go so far as to say I do not mourn having breasts, and I do not really remember having them. It is almost like they were never mine.
When I look at young queer people today defining their genders by a myriad of ever-changing names as well as actions [binders, top surgeries, harnesses, and infinite other accessories and approaches], I feel as inspired as if I just took a trip to Spain or saw a breathtaking Broadway show.
My arrival at my flat chest was not directly linked to my unfurling gender prism in any conscious way, and yet we found each other. I found they/them pronouns and queer friends after I found myself. That’s the order in which it happened for me. I spend my days reckoning with something that has been here the entire time.
“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”
Jose Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
This does not mean that this is your experience, reader, readers, friends. You deserve to look however you like. What makes you feel beautiful at midnight or early morning, when no one is looking save for a mirror or a doting lover? You deserve to feel radiant. Take the steps to let your body look however you’d like it to look. And, all along the way, starting today, you can certainly wear dresses. Pretend you are trying to impress no one except David Bowie. In your bedroom, capitalism is not king. You are the king. If there is one thing we can learn from genderfluid folks, it is that dresses, slacks, words, songs, sex positions, poems………..are for everybody. These new ideas are not only for queerness, they are lessons from queerness for humanity. These are the rules that were made to be broken and when we break them, we do not only free ourselves, we free the entire globe.
In other words, we walk each other home.
placing my hands on my belly and sending it love <3
We love you, body! x
To survive the beast which I always thought was cancer(4x cancer survivor) and newly had e plant surgery…. I was wrong. The beast I needed to embrace was the POWER cancer has given me so I can survive and share my journey and spread the Love and Grace I feel daily about myself. Cancer will not identify me. I will identify myself.
Powerful, strong, YOU. Your power is yours always. x