Plastic surgery is a body positivity profession

Hey y’all!

I took the afternoon yesterday to do some exploring around my work-neighborhood, with the idea in my mind that it would be a way to connect with the community, with local businesses, and to just get a better feel for what it’s like around here. Up til now, I’ve mostly targeted other docs with my networking efforts—always pre-planned and always armed with treats—but for this lil experiment, I decided to go with a more organic approach.

Fine. I’ll just say it like it is…I went shopping.

I was completely charmed by two local stores in particular:

1. Hope Chest, a no-nonsense specialty lingerie store where I met Donna who has been scooping and cinching Mainline women into bras that actually fit for 30 years; and

2. Skirt, a local boutique carrying some of my most aspirational brands (la ligne, l’agence, staud…I cannot pronounce a one of them but I love their stuff) where I met Jen, who put me in an outfit that I’d never have selected myself (a cropped brown sweater and striped silk pants? Who am I!) that I am absolutely dying to wear the minute the air turns crispy.

Despite the obvious delights of this adventure, shopping in this weird semi-professional capacity showed me a side of myself that I know I need to work on. I reflexively say not-that-nice things about my body when I’m in any kind of sartorial situation.

(Lemme just get it out real quick: long torso broad shoulders un-dainty ankles a forever convex lower abdomen and my right breast is slightly bigger than my left)

Ok there I said it.

This is a terrible habit, to neg yourself when somebody else’s attention lands on your body, and I know I’m not the only one who does it. But it’s so completely at odds with how I think and talk to my patients about their bodies…and really how I view other people’s bodies in general! If I try to dig down on it, I think it’s a misguided self-defense mechanism: naming my flaws before somebody else can…as if that keeps me in control.

I view myself as being in the body positivity business. I know how that sounds given that I spend my days pinching and prodding people’s sensitive areas and thinking about how I can “fix” them, but it’s true.

To me, there’s nothing more hopeful and positive than choosing agency in any area of your life. Taking the hand you’re dealt and asking—even if you’re just asking—if you could have more or better. Taking the bold step to do something big for yourself (because if there’s one thing I know about plastic surgery: we women are doing it for ourselves).

Maybe I’m drunk on the industry Kool-Aid…if you think so, please feel free to let me have it. But fwiw here’s my public pledge: I am going to make a renewed effort to quell my negative self-talk and to practice what I preach when it comes to self-image and the complicated, inescapable reality that we are not brains in jars but rather fully-integrated body-having beings. Messy, imperfect, mutable, miraculous, beautiful.

Talk soon xx

Liz

P.S. go see Donna and Jen ;)