Hi, I’m Heather. (Patreon)

How does one start something like this?

“I wasn’t always Heather With The Boobs.”

Nah. Too ‘90s Lifetime drama. 

Maybe, “It was the spring of 2014. Unseasonably cold, the wind swept in from the north, lending a chill to the sunny afternoon.”

Too narrative. This is supposed to be a diary, not a piece in the New Yorker (I wish). 

“Hi, I’m Heather.” 

Yeah, why the hell not. 

Hi, I’m Heather. Heather Beck. That's not my real name, because this is still the internet, and I’m not a silly goose. But everyone needs a pen name, or a stage name, or an electronic identity name, and that’s the one I picked. Not a good as Stormy Daniels, but what you gonna do. Performance art is performance art.

Welcome to my diary. Well, it’s kind of my diary. I’m going to type out excerpts from my journal as we go (I’m still a pencil-using girl), adding to them, new stuff, old stuff, whatever. You’re not going to see the really good things this little book has to hold. But who knows. Maybe I’ll get into a sharing mood down the line and will change some names to protect the innocent. 

I never really kept a diary to be honest. Not before. I always liked writing growing up (it’s what I do for a living now), but I never kept a journal until a few years ago, and I’ve actually been pretty good at it, consistency-wise. It’s nice to fill up a whole Moleskine instead of leaving it to the fate of a million journals out there, where 10 pages have impassioned prose, and the rest are doomed to sit blank, forever. 

Turns out, I have a lot to write about. Where to start. Well, if you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’ve seen some of my pictures on Instagram (@heatherwiththeboobs, but why am I shameless plugging when you already know that?). Here’s a little more than they’ll allow you to stick in the bio line at the top. And it’ll probably answer some of your questions (you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t curious?).

I’m 34. I was born in Pennsylvania, but I grew up all over the east coast, so I don’t really consider home to be anywhere. As far as where I’m living now, it’s in the US, right-hand side, somewhere in the middle.

I have a bachelors in print journalism, which in hindsight, is just about as useful as a degree in animal husbandry or phrenology. I was an okay writer before student loans, and I’m an okay writer after student loans (though I found out what an inverted pyramid is, so totes worth it — hint: it’s not a sex position). But, it got me a job.

My 20s were fine. I worked in an office. Magazine work. For a while, I thought I was doing the Good Lord’s work, disseminating vital information to a curious electorate. But it was really just marketing. Selling people shit they don’t need, that they can buy with money they don’t have, was a more abbreviated job description. 

At this point, you’re probably starting to get bored. So I’ll skip a lot of the more mundane crap and cut to the chase. When I was 30, I had a one-night stand with a guy who was really hot in a John Hamm kinda way, but not relationship material (like most of Jon Hamm’s characters). 

One missed period, three home pregnancy tests, and one blood test later, I discovered that I had, in fact, been knocked up. I thought we had taken all the necessary precautions to prevent baby makin’, but I was mistaken. 

This was the very start of what would become the biggest roller coaster of my life. Part of me wanted to keep the baby. Another part of me knew that I wasn’t ready to become a mom, because I had never wanted to be a mom anyway. Throw into this emotional turmoil the fact the backwoods, shit-water state I was living in made enforcing Roe v. Wade way more difficult than it had to be, and some time started to pass. 

I don’t know if I would have gone through with an abortion, even if it would have involved crossing state lines and all that shady-sounding stuff. Because before too long, I suffered a miscarriage. (Bummed out yet!?)

Here’s the thing about miscarriages. They hit you to the core. They make you feel worthless, inadequate, and for the first time in your life, you feel truly unfamiliar with yourself, betrayed by your own body, like how could it do such a cruel, horrible thing. I didn’t even know if I wanted this baby, and I was devastated. I can’t quite reach into the emotional depths of a woman who has her heart set on having a child, and having something like this happen.

Another thing about miscarriages? They’re a lot more common than you’d think. Like open relationships or a taco that’s made with fried chicken in place of a shell, miscarriages are things people don’t openly broadcast having. But when the conversation gets fired up, it becomes apparent just how prevalent they are. 

I had a good support structure, so guilt, remorse, acceptance, and other expansions on the five steps of grief were handled in their due time. But just as I was putting the puzzle back together, I noticed some changes. I miraculously made it through puberty without being a poster child for Proactiv, but in the months following this hormonal hurricane, broke out more quickly than a prisoner in a cardboard-walled jail. I put on some weight, too — I hadn’t always been what you would call super-skinny, but I was healthy. Fate, however, decided to give me a potbelly that no amount of sit ups would dispel… to think there was a time not that long ago where THAT was the target of my vanity (always looking a little pregnant, too, seemed like a weird little reminder from fate about everything I had just been through).

One more change hit. One I didn’t notice too much at first, and chalked up (pretty naively in hindsight) to the rest of my new early-30s chubbiness. My 36C cup bras, from the practical black ones I wore to work, to the cute frilly ones I’ve always been too sentimental (or optimistic?) to get rid of, started pinching; straining; digging in; and finally, overflowing like a couple of loaves of rising bread. I tried to ignore it. But it became apparent that I was bordering on inappropriate.

My stubbornness lasted a while, and there was a brief period where I kept the form-over-function brassiers in a drawer while I opted for my also-overworked selection of sports bras. By the time my friend forced me to hit up a shop for a professional measurement, I discovered that I was now rocking a pair of DDs. I was, for the first time, no longer in the realm of the amply chested. I was, instead, solidly busty. 

Short on excess cash, and still holding onto the thought that a little jogging would bring the girls back to normal, I bought one bra. My first, it would turn out, of many. 

...to be continued...