The dressing room mirror is a truth teller.  More silent priest than counselor, the feedback is stripped of context or justification.   Of course, Nordstrom's does have a fine dressing room and is exempt from everything I write here.  Every other shopping experience includes a trip to a row of beige closets that store owners seem to never clean. The walls are marked with smudges.   Why is there a grey smudge three and a half feet high? Harsh lighting hardly sets the tone for a warm, optimistic bath of positive feedback.   With only slightly more pride than stripping for a prison guard, I take off my clothes except underwear and socks and glance at my figure.  It really depends on way too many variables what message flashes into my head.  The mirror silently, vigilantly, holds up a message, my truth, indifferent to my vulnerability.

I almost always bring in the maximum allowed number of garments to reduce the strip downs I must go through to find a workable outfit.  The ten-second initial body scan is a pressurized visual interview.  I know the mirror has the power.

A major source of fear and judgement for me has been shopping for a bra.   Primarily because it requires getting naked.  For prudes like me, this is not trivial.  Stores are a public space with drop ceilings making it easy for a pervert to capture everything.  I imagine him sitting in his dingy apartment late at night staring at his computer screen while licking his fingers free of Cheetos dust.  Yuck.  I blame the TV show 20:20 for planting that image.  I fight these rushing thoughts as I try on one bra after another.

I recognize the source of my fear of bra shopping is less about the potential pervert and more that I am a prude. Whatever that word really means, I associate it with my militant resistance to exposure of my flesh to any judging eyes. This includes my mother, sisters, friends, teammates, doctors, and yes, even God. If God required me to enter the gates naked, I would immediately zip through the clouds determined to find a back entrance.

Most of my life, I’ve pondered the purpose of these boob keepers we women wear.

As a preteen, I believed that a bra served two purposes:  containment and nipple-erasing.  My childhood Catholicism seemed to desexualize everything in order to place the essential stepping stones to heaven. Though I was confused about this apparatus called “bra,” somehow, I knew it was linked to my sexuality.

In my family, clothes were passed down and/or shared, including bras from my two older sisters. My first bra was bigger than I needed at the time. My shirts looked like the lowlands of a mountain range with peaks that undulated each time I pressed a book to my chest.

Curiously, I wasn’t self-conscious about floating boobs. All that air allowed for complete anonymity of my nipples. It also provided them room to pop and retreat from fluctuating temperature and hormones. The nipple-eraser design made sense to me, but the containment part was just stupid and pointless.  The straps held the bra in place but it was a prison for do-gooders.   12-year-old breasts are not a flight risk.  Yet, I was now self-conscious and made things worse by refusing to allow any shifting of shoulder straps, I adjusted them so tightly that they cut into the slope between my neck and shoulders, leaving red trails where they had been. 

I was 12 when I wore my first nipple-eraser bra.. Then summer arrived. Braless shirts like tube tops were all the rage -- usually in chenille or terry cloth, providing opacity but zero containment.  As I didn’t need containment, I was left with a new awareness of the right of my nipples to just be.  Oh, how I felt the power and strength of my nipples. Torpedoing out into the world was simply amazing!  Completely oblivious to the effect torpedoing had on boys or the world at large, I motored through that summer, always my favorite season. 

By age 15, my breasts outsized either sister and my mother. Since I was the shortest in our family, and my Aunt Pat was even shorter, I convinced myself I had inherited her boobs. This scared the bejesus out of me as Aunt Pat carried two slightly downward facing Hindenburg’s attached to her chest. They were the size a small child gets lost in when hugging her.

In high school I easily lived up to my prudish standards by wearing pleated pants and high-buttoned shirts during the day. However, after school, playing basketball for the team required workout clothes of gray cotton shirts and dark blue or red shorts. In 1981, sports bras had yet to be invented and the bra construction seemed focused on the sturdiness of the straps framing the flimsy material touching my breasts.  During each workout I couldn’t prevent the dark gray sweat patches that bloomed under my arms, or the two comic strip circles that appeared like bulls eyes on my front. Running laps and back in forth in scrimmages, I felt the gravity of my breasts match the eyeballs of the some of the boys hanging out in the corner.  I may have loved my torpedo-boobs at 12 but at 15 I hated them.

Sports bras became a saving grace and staple in my bureau.  Easy to narrow my choice by how much to squish into a size M and L, I bought one in every color without trying them on.    I finally met the bra lady at Nordstrom’s and embraced the chance to face my fears and buy a bra based on data rather than fear.  I humbly acknowledge it is good to keep facing my fears as my new bra felt great and improved my shadow on the sunny sidewalk.