I am stupid proud that I was asked to participate in the inaugural Miss Spoken live lady lit show last night at Bucktown's Gallery Cabaret. For those of you who missed it, here's what I read. Keep an eye out for Miss Spoken shows in the future- it was fucking hilarious. And Samantha Irby is my ladycrush foreverrrr.
A brief history of the most amazing titties in the world. (Mine, duh.)
I was about 10 when I first learned that the little pink knobs a few inches above my belly button were something slightly more special than just appendages that resembled Chutes and Ladders game pieces. My memory for my childhood is shit, but I remember this instance unfortunately all too clearly. I was in my room, putting together a killer ensemble that consisted of jorts and a white tank top with lace edges. It’s not important to the story, but I was definitely chewing some stolen Bubbalicious as well, because...REBEL. I was headed out for an exciting dad-daughter adventure, a trip to the hardware store for some miscellaneous light bulbs. Dad came upstairs to the door of my room, took one look at my thin white tank top, and kindly asked me to please change my shirt. I knew...I knew that you could see my nipples, but I just didn’t realize that it was a big deal until I was asked to change. I nonchalantly agreed to change, but felt that first rush of body-induced shame. I mean, you can’t blame my father for not wanting to take his 10 year-old burgeoning daughter to a hardware store in Northeast Ohio looking like a drunk sorority girl. But yeah. The incident certainly didn’t do any favors for my emerging daddy issues, either. To this day when I want to be shamefully naughty, I’ll dig out a good old white tank top and strut around braless. (Again - Rose wouldn’t let me tonight.)
The next 10 or so years, my breasts essentially languished. I have very few memories of my teen breasts, oddly, but I think this is largely due to the fact that they weren’t all that prominent until my early adulthood. I’m not sure if they grew slowly, or I just didn’t show them off at all - or likely a combination. I just remember that my breasts were always laughably unimpressive in my high school years. Really, most of my teen body was. I remember walking by the soccer team one day after lunch and hearing a unanimously audible “eh.” Despite the fact that deep down, I wanted to be a teen sexpot, I also found my non-boobs amusing. So much so that I authored several zine articles about their lacklusterness in 10th and 11th grade. (My zine was off the hook, incidentally.) I made the classic jokes about the concavity of my tit-ular cavities, and the inability of my male classmates to figure out where my breasts actually were during obviously short-lived romances. Me and my tiny titties, we were cool.
So now we are getting into the bragging years. At some point in my early 20s, my breasts became ... amazing. The only scientific reason I can think of for the rapid development of my breasts from my late teens to early 20s is the countless calories ingested while shotgunning Natty Ice in college. In addition, I discovered hormonal birth control, available at the student center for 4 bucks a month. All told, I gained a good cup size in my college years and thus am eternally grateful to both beer and unnatural amounts of estrogen. The advent of camera phones came along shortly after, and I embraced this technology to garner mutual admiration for my breasts. I’ve made plenty of unsuspecting males and females take a gander. I’m that girl, and if you know me for more than 2 weeks, you’ll probably get a boob text. Twitter came along, and I would spend inordinate amounts of time crafting love poem tweets to my breasts. I was a walking infomercial for my boobs. They had been the underdogs for so long, I was ready for them to have their moment in the sun.
Like many women, I gained peak physical confidence in my late 20s and 30s. In early 2007, age 29, I joined the Windy City Rollers. At this point, my boobs really blew up (No pun intended). In derby, politically correct or not, our bodies become communally shared property. If I could guess the number of times I’ve been felt up by a fellow skater, I’d guess that number to be somewhere in the low hundreds. Truthfully. In derby, we are always, always touching each other. We tangibly admire each other’s meat legs, face bruises, and yes- erogenous zones. By the time I joined the league, I had developed a large amount of tittie pride, so it was a match made in heaven. Playing a female-centric sport gave me an altered sense of body confidence. Women with a myriad of body types played derby, and we were all mutually lauded for both the athleticism and sexuality of our parts. Thick legs, big asses are desirable: these are functionally beautiful in the world of contact sports. A common drill in roller derby is a paceline. Skaters (usually 10-20) form a single-file line, and do a variety of drills - jumps, maneuvering, sprints, etc over the course of 5 to 20 minutes. The paceline is where a lot of body love happens. Countless times, the skater behind me in a paceline not only verbally admired the growing strength of my booty, but also gave me a reach-around nipple squeeze. A lotta love.
In 2009, so much of the Windy City Rollers family had seen and touched my breasts that I actually won a league award for having the best breasts. The Golden Tickets Award. Concrete proof that my girls are punk rock as fuck. I could not have been more proud than if I had won an award based on actual athletic talent.
I began to use my breasts as a bartering tool. One of my best friends, Mariah, is a talented photographer and was a fellow skater. She has a particular admiration for my breasts. One year I was dissatisfied with my roller derby promo headshot (because my teeth looked extra horsey), so I begged her to shoot a new one for me. In return, I promised to let her do a photoshoot of my boobs. A photo of me topless with a taxidermied turkey still hangs in her living room. And I got a killer headshot.
In 2012 my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Kind of a buzzkill. In addition to her diagnosis, her mother had also died of breast cancer when she was 11. The year of my mom’s cancer treatment was a tough one, but after a double mastectomy and a round of chemo, she is cancer free, thank god. It was highly recommended by her physicians that I also begin to see a specialist and start the tornado of diagnostic testing. In the past couple of years, I’ve become intimately familiar with mammograms, breast MRIs, breast ultrasounds, and biopsies. I could wax about these experiences for a while, particularly how a mammogram feels like a night in a frat house...but those are stories for another day.
I think a lot about the future of my breasts. Through medical math magic, my breast specialist has informed me that my chances of developing breast cancer (based on family history, lifestyle, and other risk factors) are about 3 times that of the average woman. Which is not insignificant. However, that still puts my risk at somewhere in the low to mid 30 percent range. I’m still more likely, technically, to not get cancer. Unfortunately, despite being a statistician by trade, I’m first and foremost a pessimist. Deep down I know that at some point, I’m gonna lose these sweet beautiful porcelain titties. And it’s gonna be shitty as hell. I’ve based a lot of my identity around my breasts, and the loss of them will literally and figuratively take away a big piece of me.
You’d think that this information gained in the past year or so would’ve made me more humble, more respectful of my breasts.
But it’s made me so much worse. I’m maintain a rigorous schedule of daily breast selfies. With newfound knowledge of the potential impermanence of my breasts, I feel that it’s my noble duty to share what I’ve been given with the world while I still can. Although I hold pride in other achievements, like being an accomplished researcher at one of the best universities in the world, and skating with a nationally ranked athletic league….I mean let’s face it, these melons are the fucking pinnacle. I’m totally ok with my legacy being based solely on my mammary glands. We’re all just trying to make the world a better place, 2 nipples at a time.
Thank you. (And you’re welcome.)
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