Explicit

I bought a bra the other day that actually fit. Usually, I'm a sports-bra-all-the-time kind of girl, but sometimes I bring out the real, fully lined, underwire bra. It doesn't make me feel more feminine or pretty. In fact, they are rather uncomfortable and, in my opinion, unflattering. I do sometimes feel, however, that I'm doing my boobs a disservice by always binding them down.

I became a "woman" at the tender age of 14, but my "woman parts" didn't develop until I was probably 18 or 19. So this whole wrangling the girls into position thing is still uncharted territory. The theory is this: because I was diagnosed with Crohn's at 15, my doctors think that I was probably deprived of a lot of nutrient absorption through my colon and it stunted my growth. To think, I could have been a 6' DD kind of woman. And I thank God every day that I'm not. I wish I could put a slide show on here of my progression through high school and college. Then you could really see what I'm talking about. But since I don't have those pictures handy to timeline, I'll just have to show by telling.

Age 14: Looked pretty much like a mouse with horse teeth. While I am thankful for my smile now, it was entirely too large for my face from about 12-16. Weighed less than 100lb. Stood at probably 5'1" or 5'2". My favorite outfit was a pair of washed out Gap jeans that had a nice little fray starting in the knee and a horrendous pink sweater that my Gigi bought me (that I still have).

At 15: Not a whole lot of change. Until...dun dun dun...steroids. Not anabolic, performance enhancing steroids, but prednisone. The kind of steroids that make you want to eat ALL of the time, make your cheeks swell like you're storing food for the winter months, and give you the jitters. Steroids made me a fat kid for the first time in my life, and sometimes I still kind of live there. My clothes stopped fitting, I couldn't stop eating, but I was "healthy" by all medical standards.

16-17: Stringy hair, braces, still no boobs (and at this point in my life, like any teenager, I longed for them), stick legs.

18-19: College. Which means weight gain of roughly 10lb, then loss of about 15 (when softball started). And then magically, one day, I woke up and had these foreign objects attached to my chest. Gone were the days of built-in-bra tanktops.

I was, quite literally, a late bloomer. Now, I'm not going to try to say here that my boobs were the only body part effected by Crohn's. I might have grown a few more inches, or I might not have. Maybe I would have been able to build muscle more efficiently, maybe not. But the instant boobage definitely stuck out. And they still surprise me today.

Imagine it like this: Hypothetically, you wear a size 0 jean. So no butt, hips, or thighs. And hypothetically, you wear a size 34 C bra. There's disproportion there.

I really can't imagine what people like Heidi (from that MTV show...you know? the one that's had like 117 plastic surgeries) are thinking when they get breast implants that make them lean a little when they walk. Here I am walking around trying to hide them, and people are putting plastic under their pectoral muscles and filling the plastic with foreign substances to make them stick out more. That is as crazy to me as someone walking into a doctor's office and saying, "I want bigger eyes. Here, just take mine out and use these marbles. Yep, that will do it."

My aha! moment came the other day while I was bra shopping. I have a few ol' trusty bras, but I just felt compelled to check out my options (plus I had a coupon for $15 off). Normally, I will buy the size down in a bra because it makes me feel a little more secure. I've been fitted for bras probably 3 times and they've all given me the same measurements. But I never use them. So, as an experiment, I took to the dressing room the size that I normally buy and the size that I've been fitted as. I tried on the size I normally buy first. Not bad. And then the size I'm measured for. Are you kidding me? A bra can look this good?

I'm not saying its good enough to wear without a shirt over it, but its definitely okay to wear under one. And its given me a new rationale.

Lets say that I want to drop a jean size. The next time I go jean shopping, I might buy the size down in jeans hoping that at some point they will fit right. Well, a bra size is not like a jean size. Unless I dropped or put on an ungodly amount of weight, boobs are going to stay the same size. Kind of like feet. Once you've got your shoe size, you're pretty much good for life. So, its funny to me that at 24, I have just now given into my bra size.

Its just one more thing that I'd like to add to my list of things learned after college.