By Lauren Hockenson for Femsplain, cross-posted with permission

When I thought no one was looking, I locked myself in the bathroom that I shared with my four brothers and sisters to stare at myself in the mirror. At nearly eleven years old, scrawny and small, I could really only see the upper part of my torso. But that was all that mattered.

I took my shirt off and opened the chapter to the hygiene book I had dog-eared inconspicuously to avoid suspicion from my noisy, crowded house. My eyes read slowly over the title.

BREASTS.

I stared at my chest, looked at the photos, and wondered: Will I get mine? The teen girl in the body-positive illustration carefully outlined how, like a tulip, breasts grew from little bulbs under the skin and then bloomed, eventually, into fully rounded curves. I didn’t understand why everything that was going to happen with my body had to have a gardening reference. Even at 24, I still don’t.

Despite what I thought was a rather covert operation into exploring the possibilities of my still-infertile chest soil, my mother got the hint and showed up soon after with my first bra. Cute, tasteful triangles of a simple pastel pink. I hugged her, excited to wear it under the otherwise loose, shapelessly khaki uniforms from my middle school and feel like something was actually happening in there. My mom, ever prescient in a way only a woman named Cassandra could be, looked at me knowingly.

“Be careful what you wish for, sweetie.”

My first bra, and its similarly designed cohorts in white and a faded blue, was a totem for my impending womanhood — something I embraced in a naïve excitement because it meant I would no longer feel like the runt. I was small for my age, trailing behind even my younger sister in size for the majority of my childhood. Compounding the issue was the fact that my classmates were all at least a year older than me — an obvious byproduct of skipping kindergarden. Everyone else seemed wiser, more mature and effortlessly worldly, something that my effusive excitement for school would never match. I was uncool then. But with boobs, I reasoned, I could fake it.

Those bras felt like the first step to feeling part of the group. But even as other girls began sprouting and sporting their slight curves, I remained geometrically uninteresting. Lackluster, even. But in my unwavering preteen enthusiasm, I patiently awaited my day.

And my day did come, with much less delicacy than a garden’s first bloom. Seemingly overnight in the eighth grade, my breasts came in and immediately overwhelmed my frame. As a junior bridesmaid in my older sister’s wedding during the summer of that year, I stuck out like a sore thumb: A beautiful row of tall, stunning college girls with Midwestern complexions and smallish breasts, and their 5’2″ 13-year-old, C-cupped caboose. My coral bridesmaid’s dress had to be ordered in a woman’s size 12 and tailored down to fit the rest of my body. I was a summer sausage.

I didn’t have any time to adjust to my new body by high school, but I spared myself perhaps countless hours of awkwardness by enrolling in an academically rigorous all-girls Catholic school. However, the environment made me oblivious and foreign to my own body politic — especially as I filled out further into a D-cup at 125 pounds. As I accepted dates from pimply-faced suitors from the neighboring boys’ school, rumors swirled about how much of those dates I spent in the back seat of cars. I hadn’t even a boy see my (now fully underwired for support) bra at that point, and I was mortified. The words that had inelegantly returned to me through loyal friends turned over in my head: Have you seen her? She must be putting out.

I stopped dating entirely, but it didn’t end the speculation. Staying over at a friend’s house for a summer sleepover when I was 16, I stepped out for a midnight snack wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and a pair of shorts. I was too oblivious to notice my friend’s older brother gawk at my frame — or their mother witness the incident. But weeks later, when I was sitting down at the kitchen table of a separate friend, her mother pulled me aside and said that other moms were discussing my intentions with their teen sons. I felt the sick feeling I’d experienced before, knowing where the conversation would lead.

“Maybe, just, you know … Don’t wear that tank top anymore.”

The immediate repercussions of the body I was so eager to grow into hit me like a ton of bricks, but they didn’t end once I left for college and beyond. In an event that sounds like an atrocious set-up for a particularly dirty joke, my breasts grew not one but two sizes, up to an F-cup, by the time I turned 23.

I remain overly considerate about my presentation, absolutely cringe when someone calls me sexy in public, and get red-faced when even the largest of swimsuit tops makes me feel like an amateur porn star. I’ve been manhandled by overzealous assholes who thought the way my body curved gave them license to touch, reprimanded by an insensitive boss who considered my decision to wear remotely form-fitting clothing of any kind a sign that I was interested in sleeping my way to the top, and asked that dreaded question by many friends: “Have you thought about reducing?”

Despite all of this, I won’t change the body I was given. My breasts are still mine, even on the days where I wish I could just take them off and be taken seriously. And I won’t let others shame me into altering it just to fit in. I choose to rock what my roommates call my “stupid boobs,” and if you don’t like it, you can move right along.

Some bloom a little, others grow an entire orchard, and either way is okay. I’ll keep tending my garden with the love and care it deserves.

Lauren Hockenson is the social media and editorial manager for BitTorrent. She lives, surrounded by a wall of snacks, in San Francisco.