Self image and outer appearance

Sara was the first girl in her class to have breasts. She was 11 years old. Puberty had not yet sunken in with her when her mother tried to have that mother and daughter talk about soon you’ll be a woman, you’ll get your period and personal hygiene is very important now etc. Sara didn’t really listen, she had been reading teenage magazines in secret for about two years.

But when her breasts started to grow, this put her to a problem: how to dress? Her mother had always bought her long and wide T-shirts, and with the first dents appearing she looked completely out of shape – she thought that she looked fat in those.

She tried a sweater that was really tight and made her blooming chest appear bigger than it was. For the first time, her friends noticed her breasts and were envious: “You’re breasts are too big. You need to have surgery to make them smaller or you will have problems with your back for the rest of your life.” Yes, Sara didn’t feel comfortable with her breasts at all. She couldn’t understand why other girls envied her and put socks in their empty bras.

When boys started to play an important role in her life, her breasts were in her way again. She had the feeling that boys were only looking at them and not at her. She had a hard time making her first boyfriend understand that she did not appreciate him opening her bra in public.

By the time puberty ended, she had gotten used to the fact that her breasts were bigger than those of her friends – she tried to use them as weapons and started to wear T-shirts with a very low neck-line. But after a party pictures of her neck-line started to circulate around her school. She felt embarrassed and took more care to dress decently.

Sara’s self-image in her early twens was that of a rather curvy woman with big breasts which attracted a certain type of men - not necessarily the type of man she wanted to attract. But when she was 24, she had to learn the hard way that self images are sometimes far away from the reality. She was in a disco with her best girlfriends wearing a T-shirt that highlighted her curves and hid the problem zones, she had started to feel really comfortable with her body and she was on the hunt. That night all her friends were talked to, but she wasn’t. That’s because they all have bigger breasts than I do, she thought bitterly and it occurred to her that her breasts weren’t that big at all, in comparison to her friends quite ordinary. That was what she had always wanted during puberty, but could the ordinary compete in a world of plastic surgery?