Acceptance

So one of my earlier memories in life is in primary school in year 5. I tripped over and fell onto this girl in my class called Chloe, and I remember very clearly my face being planted right in between her newly formed boobs. We would only have been 9 or 10 at the time, but she was an early bloomer and I... well I'm still waiting for my blossoming almost a decade later. In fact I can speculate that age 9 Chloe probably has larger breasts than present day me.

Anyway, this particular episode of face planting had a very strong effect on me and as I progressed onwards through secondary school and saw Chloe and the rest of the girls around grow into a more and more womanly figure I was left fluttering behind in the distance, feeling worse and worse about my body each week when we changed for PE.

Lula Lu Petites, sourced from globalintimatewear.com

I remember seriously considering at one point when I was around 14 padding out my bra with socks or tissue or whatever to try to keep up. I would buy bras with what was, quite frankly, an absurd amount of padding in them; I just wanted to be normal and for the boys to be interested in me.

When I think about it now, I'm sure something similar was going through Chloe's mind. I can imagine now that she would have felt like she stood out and she wasn't normal, and maybe she just wanted to look like all the other girls who were smaller. And maybe the fact that the boys weren't interested in me had more to do with the fact that every time an attractive specimen of the opposite sex approached me I turned bright red and made myself look like a complete fool, and I was not at all popular, which at that age is the most important thing in the world.

The Mad Men actress with a slightly larger chest than me...

When I managed to find a member of the opposite sex who both played the guitar and got turned on by red bumbling fools in year 11, it took... well, it took until only a few months ago (and I'm off to uni later this year) for me to believe that he actually was happy with my boobs, he wasn't just lying and going home and crying over a photo of Christina Hendrix every night. It's taken a few years, but I have finally grown to accept my shape. It's petite. It's delicate. It's perky. And I honestly believe that it can be  just as feminine as Chloe's.

There isn't a single woman out there who doesn't have positive aspects to her body, it's just a journey in self confidence to accept and learn to love them.