Guest Post: My Breast Reduction, Myself

If you've ever considered getting a breast reduction, read this first.

In this very special edition of Freak Palace, artist and writer Eileen Havant Townsend reflects on the breast reduction surgery she underwent in 2021. I first met Eileen at Columbia University, where we were both doing our Master’s Degree in Journalism. My first memory involved her waxing poetic to our class about Mort Garson’s Plantasia, and between that and her punkish blue hair, I knew I wanted to be her friend. Not only is she unbelievably stylish —Nan Goldin once complimented her outfit—she’s a gifted writer, painter and true original. For years, she was editor-in-chief at The Northern Logger (where she documented the unexpectedly incredible outfits people wear to logging conferences) and is now a painter with her own studio in Los Angeles. She lives with her fiancé, the painter Adam Higgins, who specializes in oil paintings of caesar salads, and their dog Pippi.—Isabel Slone

It seems strange to refer to what took place as “my breast reduction”, as in “two weeks ago, when I had my breast reduction…”, though that is the most convenient way to put it. It is mine in the sense that my breasts were the ones reduced, but a breast reduction is a procedure, and the procedure feels distinctly not mine. The procedure belongs to the surgeon and the hospital. The surgeon performs the procedure nearly every week and as often as twice a day. The routine before and after surgery — consultation with receptionists, nurses, anesthesiologists — is a formal choreography I entered into only briefly. I checked in at a desk, wore a disposable mask, was given a gown and yellow nonslip surgical socks, and spent several hours alone in a pink, windowless waiting room before a small commotion of people in scrubs arrived to ferry me into temporary oblivion. Despite the barcoded nametag bracelet they attached around my wrist, the process felt basically anonymous.

Calling it “my breast reduction”, then, feels embarrassing, as if I’m trying to claim a stake in what happened in a scramble to assert individual agency in a system in which I obviously had little. I went to the hospital, they asked me standard questions, made me sign releases, knocked me out with drugs, removed a large portion of my breasts, sewed me up, dispatched me with painkillers and antibiotics and gauze, and that was that. I ceded my physical and mental autonomy in order to gain a desired result. The decision to engage was mine and the aftermath is mine, but in no way was the surgery itself mine. So, rather than “my breast reduction”, I prefer to refer to it in an awkward passive voice: “The procedure I had done.” How else to explain the weirdness of the surgeon sketching the shape of my new breasts onto my old breasts in green sharpie, writing beneath my collarbone my desired size, “C/D”, as if he might otherwise forget mid-operation? 

Perhaps I only hear the inflection of ownership — the cloying need for an individual claim on an institutional experience — because of how many YouTube videos I watched leading up to the surgery made by women who explained their experience of breast reduction surgery. All these videos were called variations on “My Breast Reduction Surgery: Recovery? Regrets? Pain? Cost?” and promised to answer my questions in video diary form. The vloggers recorded their drives to the pre-operative consultations, their late-night anxieties before the surgery, the painkiller-tinged 24 hours post-surgery, and the big reveal when they first uncovered their modified chests. I watched these videos in the week leading up to the procedure, replaying ones I’d already seen five or six times. What I was curious about had less to do with logistics and more to do with what it felt like for these women to see their breasts change dramatically. What is it like, I wondered, having always known oneself to be a certain kind of object, to suddenly be without that object? To wake up and have to live with a new object entirely? Would I feel, as one vlogger I watched put it upon seeing her breasts in their new shape, like “an alien creature”? 

I told a lot of people, in the weeks before the breast reduction, that I felt ambivalent about my large breasts. I experienced having large breasts much like I experience air travel, as an uncomfortable adult lesson in how, despite the fact that I am locked in my body, I exercise only partial control over it. I didn’t hate my breasts, but I didn’t love them either. They caused me frequent pain and less frequent pleasure. For the most part, they felt like a kind of para-public property, a random object I’d been assigned to carry that others could remark on and enjoy, that I’d have to go through the motions of acknowledging. It was my responsibility to dress them and care for them, but they ultimately belonged to the world around me. I recall an incident from when I was 17, sitting at a round lunch table in my school cafeteria with a group of guy friends, wearing a low-cut top. One of the boys launched a piece of popcorn from across the table, aiming to land it between my breasts, a table sport. Everyone laughed. Later, he apologized. “It’s cool,” I replied. “I guess they invite that.” Over the years, I developed a detached expertise in what my breasts invited and didn’t invite, the situations in which they could be presented to my advantage and times when they needed to be repressed. I became a kind of agent of my breasts, alternately protective and profiteering. 

When I first met the plastic surgeon who performed the reduction, and told him my bra size, he said, “Wow! You need a breast reduction!” He assured me in a friendly, brisk way that the insurance company would certainly cover it. It was what I’d hoped he’d say, but I felt somewhat surprised — was everyone in agreement? That this feature, which I felt had never quite been mine to begin with, should no longer be mine to deal with? On one hand, it seemed low stakes to have my breasts quickly and quietly reduced. They caused me a lot of back pain and inconvenience. I couldn’t wear normal bathing suits or many styles of clothing. They appeared too pendulous and heavy on my small frame. I’d considered the surgery for years, but never pulled the trigger, due to a variety of factors: I didn’t have the time in my schedule, or the right healthcare, and I was worried about the fact that if I ever have children, I will likely not be able to breastfeed. Beyond that, I think a part of me remained in disbelief for years that a natural feature of my body could cause me so much grief. I blamed my back pain on my lifestyle; if I could only find the right way to exercise or the right bras to wear, I surely wouldn’t suffer as much. But what is natural, anyway? I used to believe that plenty of things about being a woman were natural before realizing that nature is, to quote Virginia Woolfe in Orlando, a “bad god.” By the time I decided to have breast reduction surgery I’d decided that what was natural was not necessarily meaningful. My breasts caused me pain. I could get rid of them. 

Still, the surgeon’s attitude seemed unceremonious. If I felt anything related to my breasts, it was a feeling akin to the pride a homeowner feels who happens to buy a house with a special tree in the front yard, a tree that visitors comment on and everyone admires together, but that has troublesome roots. I might not have planted the tree, but now I had to decide to remove it, which felt unfair. And here was a stranger with a merely technical relationship to the whole problem, who I paid to tell me that the solution had been obvious all along. I wanted to object — “But many people love my breasts!” I just happened not to be one of them. 

The night before the surgery, I had dinner with a trans friend who’d had top surgery, back in the days when top surgery was a semi-clandestine operation about which, according to him, “no one knew anything.” I felt a lot of kinship with my friend’s relationship with his breasts, his offhanded dislike of them (when I texted him that I was going to “get the chop”, he replied: “Bye bitches!”) and his feeling that, despite having been born with breasts, they had essentially nothing to do with him. I told him I’d been trying to summon some eleventh-hour relationship to my chest. I’d even asked a friend to photograph me topless in the week leading up to the surgery, but when the time had come to take the photos, I knew I’d probably never be interested in looking at them. My trans friend assured me that it was okay to have a part of my body I never liked and felt nothing towards, that I didn’t need to fake an appreciation of it. I took his word for it. I felt excited to be expediently rid of my burden. 

 It took me by surprise, then, that I spent two days after the surgery crying. What triggered the sadness wasn’t my new breasts themselves, which are small and round and unobtrusive. I looked at them almost as soon as I could stand up, gingerly removing bandages from my chest as if I were unboxing an expensive present. I expected gore, but there was almost none, only a thin red scar under surgical tape. My new breasts float on my torso like two friendly moons, bound in a perfectly calibrated gravitational force. They are proportional, likeable. I like them. My surgeon likes them too; viewing my chest in our brief post-operative visit he said, “I have to pat myself on the back for this one!” It feels more irrelevant that I like them, however, because breasts feel like less of a “them” now, and more like a part of the rest of my body. They’ve lost their quality of being a distinct feature. Whereas I used to relate to them as an object and expected to relate to them as a different sort of object, I now feel that I have no object to deal with at all. 

 What made me cry wasn’t the fact that I’ve been relieved of my role as guardian of large breasts. It was the fact that it occurred to me for the first time — lying on my back, wounded, immobile, coming down from Percocet — that my breasts actually were a part of my body, and that they’d been a part of my body all along. They didn’t feel like me, but they’d been mine. I’d so externalized my relationship to them that I’d forgotten it would hurt to remove them. And there I lay, wounded. I felt enraged at the world for being a place in which I’d not only been unable to appreciate the integrity of my body, but in which I hadn’t even experienced my body as integrated. I’d woken up from surgery as a more streamlined creature, harder and less obtrusive and with a physique I no longer have to justify to others. I fit in most clothes now. When I fully heal, I’ll be able to perform work better. There will be no more problems. I won’t even have to worry so much about breast cancer. I have adapted myself. All I could come up with to explain why I was weeping was that I wished there was a place soft enough for my former breasts to thrive. I wanted a world made for them, but what I probably meant was that I wish the world had been better built for me. It was the old grief, grief over the fact that nature has not been and will not be a place I can call home. 

Perhaps I should consider the absence of my breasts metaphysically. My body was never an oneiric house of femininity and my breasts never made me more or less of a woman, which is not to say that womanhood doesn’t exist. I see myself as a kind of consistent collection of attributes called “Eileen”, a jumble of appearances more visible at some moments and less visible at others. I believe that when I die, some of that Eileen jumble will remain extant in the world. I temporarily participate in Eileen-ness, the same way that I participate in womanhood, in the same way I participated in the phenomena of large breasts. I do not believe my large breasts have gone to heaven. They remain a part of me that, if you stare long enough in the right light, you might just catch. 

But how to reconcile this scattered knowledge of myself — the Eileen who is a jumble of large breasts and small breasts, woman and man, child and adult — with the feeling of being right here, right now, alive? In a strange inversion, when the surgeon cut into my breasts, creating an anchor-shaped gap between skin and skin, he closed a rift I felt between my experience of my body and how the world reflects it back to me. In the space between what the culture thought of my large breasts and my experience of bearing them, there was pain, but there was also a great deal of wilderness to explore. I became acquainted with myself in that wilderness. In the necessity to orient myself around the object of my breasts, I noticed my own capacity for fluidity and movement. There will inevitably come a time when I will no longer be looked at and no longer have to manage beauty and youth at all. In the past week, I’ve found myself wondering if my new sensibility foreshadows what will happen when I eventually lose my status as a young(ish) woman. At that point, I imagine I will feel as if my fluidity can exist in contrast to something besides my own image. Maybe I will pour out, running myself wildly over every surface I encounter.

The real sense in which my breast reduction was my breast reduction is perhaps simply in calling it that. I claim it in order to see how I brush up against it: am I intact? Was I ever? An epitaph, then: RIP, my large breasts. I never knew you, but in the process of not knowing you, I did sort of know myself.