Lana

When I was 13 I developed large breasts, I had a D cup size, nothing too crazy, but because of my body frame and the fact that I live in Spain, where big breasts aren’t too common and no underwear stores have my size (unless it’s minimiser bras) it was VERY noticeable.
I was still barely over being a child, my first year as a teenager, and when I saw old men they would always remind me of my grandfather. That is, till the day I walked up my street and some old men mentioned how my breasts bounced and how they would like to help me carry them. I was so shocked, I didn’t understand why they would ever say that to me, I wasn’t aware of the world I was entering, how I unintentionally was invited to the sad real world. I feel like that day they took a big part of my childhood away.
While growing up my breasts always seemed to be a problem, my mother would buy me minimiser bra’s so that my clothes would look better, therefore teaching me my clothes didn’t look good on me, instead of looking for clothes that suited my body type. I was either bought granny bra’s or lingerie, which never seemed to match how I felt.
Then while I was growing up I noticed the stares I’d get from men so I started covering up, and one day in secondary school, one of my class mates told me that I had great boobs, but there was no point in having them because I was always hiding them. I remember feeling bad, like I was doing something wrong because I wasn’t showing them. Then one day when I was 18, I was going to the gym, which I hardly ever did, because it was so hard to find a sports bra that actually worked anyway, and I chose a particularly good sports bra, that held me tight but gave me a great cleavage, and I felt good. I only had a V-neck t-shirt because the others I had were dirty, and when my flatmate saw me, she was shocked. I asked her why and she explained that she expected other girls to go around flaunting but she hadn’t expected me to. She was completely unaware somehow of the injustice of her putting a t-shirt on and it being a normal day and of me putting it on and being called an attention seeker and that I wanted to flaunt what I had.
All this made me want to hide my breasts, I didn’t have back problems but I just hated them.
So I decided to get a breast reduction. I applied through our national health care and was accepted. When I told some of my friends they were horrified, others were really happy for me but they all had these strong opinions about how I looked, not about how it affected my health, which would be the best reason to have it.
I realised then, that I truly didn’t want a breast reduction, I wanted to live a life where people would think they had the right to voice an opinion about my body, where I wouldn’t be given lascivious looks because of it, where it wouldn’t feel like because I had them, I was asking for attention, where I wouldn’t get home at the end of the day and take my minimiser bras off and breathe out in relief, because they were cutting into my skin. I realised that that world didn’t exist, and I wasn’t going to find it by having a breast reduction. We have to make it, and I could use some help.