Mine Now: From Object to Self

Mar 28

Blog 1 of

THIS MIGHT BE DENSE: and other stories about your girls

Welcome to This Might Be Dense: and other stories about your girls.

This blog series pulls the curtain back on a part of the body that’s been so sexualized, it’s still censored: on social media, in schools, and even in medical conversations. And yet, over half a million women die each year from breast cancer.

Censoring information about women’s bodies doesn’t protect us: it endangers us.

So, this series is both personal and practical.

It’s a love letter. A rage howl. A guidebook.

It’s a reminder that ya girls were never meant to be a mystery, especially to you.

There are parts of me the world noticed before I did.

My breasts — the girls, for the algorithm — were never neutral. They arrived early, stretched my skin painfully, and came with a spotlight seemingly pre-installed. From school hallways to family comments to awkward strangers on the street, what sat front and center on my small frame became a public conversation long before it became a private one.

They were always seen, but never really known. Especially not by me.

Breasts as Public Property

If you have breasts of any size, if you grew up in a body that was policed, praised, or stared at, you know this dynamic well: it’s not just that other people look; it’s that they feel entitled to comment, assess, compare, even touch (hello, pregnant bellies).

I remember being 12 years old when a seamstress measured me for a dress and smiled, telling me I had “the perfect woman’s proportions: 36-24-36.” I didn’t understand what those numbers meant, just that she said them like I’d won something. Like I had done something right with my body. I felt a strange mix of pride, confusion, and shame because even at 12 I had the self awareness to know that I wasn’t a woman and putting that on me was off. I was a kid. But apparently, my body had already become someone else’s idea of womanhood. (Also? My chest measurement isn’t that big now, so I’m not sure what she was measuring. Ghost boobs? Future boobs? Pretend boobs??)

That moment stuck. Not because it made me feel good, quite the contrary: because it marked the beginning of a long, complicated relationship with my chest. When your body is objectified at an early age, you never really get the chance to experience ownership and I suspect that most women have this experience in one way or another.

By adolescence, I had internalized in a very basic way that my body wasn’t really mine. Sure it was mine in that I inhabited it, but the world confirmed it over and over again through catcalls, comments, unwanted stares, and men projecting their own shame and attraction onto me like it was my fault and other girls expressing feelings about my body in relation to theirs. So there was no such thing as “getting to know” my breasts on my own terms; there was only dressing to minimize, deflect, or protect (unless I dressed to play the game in search of a false sense of bodily autonomy — which, spoiler, isn’t autonomy when it’s born from self-protection).

And then after decades of that… came breastfeeding.

Useful… But still Not Yours

My son was born mid 2018 which means he wasn’t quite 2 when Covid hit. My milk came in before I gave birth. My OB still says that in another era, I’d be the village milkmaid. My boobs were each as big as my head, full and rock-hard. The first few months were brutally painful: milk, mastitis, and an ill-informed latch all crashing into each other in a haze of hormones and heat pads.

So 18 months later, there was no way I was stopping breastfeeding at a time when my child could potentially be exposed to a novel coronavirus, are you kidding me, which meant that for three years, I breastfed — and a lot of that time was through pain. I had mastitis four times. Letdown felt like shards of glass in my nipples. I leaked through nursing pads that I changed multiple times a day for the entirety of my breastfeeding journey. (I also donated freezerfuls of milk to other moms, which was a tiny bright spot in the middle of the grind.)

It was a full-time job that my body may have been physiologically ready for, but one for which I wasn’t emotionally prepared. While it was miraculous in many ways, it never felt like I had agency. My breasts became useful. But still, not necessarily mine.

It took something else entirely to really make me re-examine the relationship I had with my breasts.

The Biopsy

When I got the call that I needed a breast biopsy, my first response wasn’t panic. It was something more like: “Of course.”

Of course they’re a problem.
They’ve always been a problem.
Why wouldn’t they be a problem in this way, too?

I was scared. (42? Cancer?) I was almost relieved. (When you have a sensitive body and are dismissed as a hypochondriac for noticing every shift, it can feel like vindication when something actually shows up.) The three weeks between that call and the procedure gave me plenty of time to process all potential outcomes. By the time the week before the biopsy rolled around, I was just annoyed — like, could we just get it over with? I found myself dissociating a bit, pushing the clinical nature of it out of my mind.

What I found myself most focused on wasn’t the outcome. It was the pain. Would it hurt? Would I be able to handle it? Some women say they feel nothing; others say it’s excruciating and that 50/50 coin toss is hard for me to hold. And then, right on cue with my period, my fibrocystic breasts lit up like a fireworks show. And I realized, “Oh right. Pain is already my baseline.”

My boobs always hurt.

Reclamation Is Anti-Patriarchy Work

Here’s the thing about women and our bodies: if we care about them, it’s vanity. If we ignore them, it’s negligence. If we go braless, it’s rebellion. If we wear a push-up bra, it’s attention-seeking. There are always rules.

Getting to know your breasts is not vanity.

It is not indulgent.

It is not even just preventative care (though yes, it’s that too).

So yeah. It’s anti-patriarchy work. Because when you reclaim knowledge of your own body — especially a part of it that has been sexualized, claimed, and used by others — you are actively breaking a cycle of disconnection and ownership.

You are choosing intimacy over performance. You are building trust with a part of you that has long been treated as object instead of subject.

And for those of us parenting kids who don’t feel comfortable in the bodies they were born in (where my parents and step parents of trans and non binary kids at!) then this reclamation is all the more meaningful.

True body sovereignty means coming home to your body.

This Might Be Dense… But It’s Also Yours

The rest of this series is largely practical. We’ll cover breast tissue types, milk production, pain management, screening options, and how to decode that weird little BI-RADS number in your mammogram report. (There’s also a whole post about how we’re made from stardust and forever plastics, so my definition of practical gets loose by the end of the series!)

But this first post? This is the beginning of reclamation. Because this is the part where the story shifts from public property to private knowledge.

From object to self.

From tolerated pain to chosen care.

From spectacle to source.

Welcome to This Might Be Dense: And Other Stories About Your Girls.

If this post helped you feel more informed, keep going. This Might Be Dense: And Other Stories About Your Girls is a full series: part practical guide, part personal reclamation, all grounded in research, rage, and reverence.

🌀 Start from the beginning (current post)

🧬 Understand breast tissue types

🍼 Explore milk, hormones & density

🔥 Learn how to manage pain & fibrocystic changes

📊 Decode your BI-RADS score and risk

🩻 Know your imaging options & how to advocate

💬 Say the quiet parts out loud

🌍 Understand environmental exposures & plastic’s impact

👐 Get the breast ritual PDF to care for your girls

YOU DESERVE TO KNOW YOUR BODY BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DEFINES IT FOR YOU.