So yesterday, at the breast/onco surgeon’s, the resident comes in first, to prep me before the big cheese herself. When she prepares to do the examination of my incisions, she says, “Let’s have a look at your breasts…” <AWK Pause> “I mean” she continues, having clearly funbled the ball, “Where your breasts used to be.” WOW. Talk about a shitty save. I can’t believe she said that. No matter how good I feel about my mastectomy, to be defined entirely by lack in such an explicit way really sucks.

nailbar.jpg My biggest challenge today was when the manicurist asked me, “What shape do you like your nails?”. Yikes. This is not something I have ever spent even 2 seconds thinking about. I stared at her rather intently, hoping for clues, and then rather awkwardly confessed that, “I don’t think I have a favorite shape”. I knew that was the wrong answer. It was like being back in school. She wrote me off. I tried to recuperate my girl points by commenting on her highlights, but it was in vain. It was probably even worse than if I had just let it die quietly on the vine.

She did spend rather a long time trying to figure out why my chest was so totally flat. But looking would not yield an answer to her curiosity. I have seen this look, now, many times. When I catch people looking, they are scanning from the chest to the face and back again. I guess they are trying to figure it out. Hmmmmm. Looks like a woman’s face, but no boobs. So they look at the face again, maybe the buzz-cut short hair is another distractor, then back down to the washboard chest.

I spend countless time here and there scanning the crowd for boob-less chests myself, I must now confess. I want to see more people who look like me. I feel lonely in my state of exception. I keep hoping that I will look out into the crowd at the mall and see an obviously breast-less chest like mine, thrust proudly forward into the flow of life. But I don’t — EVER. In the Cancer Journal, Audrey Lorde talks about the politics of visibility of walking in the world, breast-less. Lorde is very passionate about the politics of visibility for the breast-less and excoriates those who would foist prosthetics or reconstruction on mastectomy patients.

I have no interest in being critical of anyone else’s choices. But I would like more visibility for those of us who travel the world without breasts. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Send me a picture of yourself. Tell me how it is, for you. Maybe we should start a Facebook group. Or make t–shirts.

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